


For Shell And Safety

by clotpolesonly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison Argent & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, BAMF Allison, BAMF Stiles, Dark Magic, Derek Hale & Original Character Friendship, Emissary Stiles Stilinski, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Human Derek Hale, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Outsider, Panic Attacks, Past Character Death, Post-Apocalypse, Sensory Overload, Supernatural creatures are known, mentions of suicide/self-sacrifice, original main character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:35:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 45,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9391199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly
Summary: Leah never wanted to be a werewolf or get caught up in anything dangerous, but she didn't really have a choice in either of those things. All she wanted to do was help a wounded stranger.But when that help involved delivering a cryptic message to The Emissary, the legendary protector of Beacon Hills, maybe that should have been a clue that danger was on the horizon.





	1. I won't ask you to run for shell and safety

**Author's Note:**

> _PROMPT: “I would really like you to write a fic about emissiary Stiles in a post-apocalyptic beacon hills, because you are a great author. Also outsider pov, because who doesn’t love outsider POv?”_
> 
>  
> 
> So this fic is a lot of firsts for me, and a lot of pushing my own boundaries. It is both very satisfying and also kicking my ass, but that just makes me more desperate to start posting because I need the validation of good comments to keep me moving, lol. So no the story is not finished yet, but I've got ~43k already written! I won't have an update schedule set until I determine exactly how long it's going to end up and thereby, how much time I'll have before I catch up to myself. But I will try to make it (relatively) speedy, so I won't be waiting a month between chapters, I promise! More like a week or two probably.
> 
> (Title is lyrics from the song Refuge From The Wreckage by It's Alive)

Leah pressed her back as close to the alley wall as she could and held her breath, but there was nothing she could do about her heartbeat. It thundered in her chest, panic-fast and dangerously obvious to anyone with the right ears to hear it. She could only hope the snarls and growls from around the corner would mask it, and that the winners of the skirmish wouldn’t care about one puny omega hiding just out of sight.

She flinched as a particularly pained yip stabbed at her eardrums, accompanied by the crunch of a bone. Jesus, how long had she been able to recognize the sound of a bone breaking from a hundred yards away? At least she wasn’t used to it yet. The day she didn’t flinch at that sound, or the myriad other noises of pain and fear that echoed all around her, was the day she had officially lost every bit of the person she was before, and she was not looking forward to that day.

She was lightheaded by the time the fighting stopped around the corner, and she cursed herself for not realizing how _stupid_ it would be to start breathing again _after_ the silence fell when there was no ambient noise to cover it up. The longest she’d ever held her breath before was approximately four minutes and she was quickly approaching that mark. But there were still three heartbeats within earshot, and drawing their attention was a much surer death sentence than self-asphyxiation.

Her head swam, the heavy rush of her pulse somehow making her twice as dizzy as the oxygen deprivation alone, but she couldn’t let herself breathe yet. The crunch of boots on gravel reached her and she dug her claws into the brick wall to steady herself as she swayed on her feet. Fuzzy blackness was creeping into the edges of her vision but the crunching was fading, moving _away,_ and it would only be a few more seconds. Just a few more seconds, that was all she needed. Just a few…

When at last the footsteps were far enough away, Leah gasped in as much air as she could manage. She sagged against the wall, knees shaking too much to hold her up, and the leftover adrenaline was almost enough to force her fangs out. She held them back—she didn’t like any part of the shift, but that was by far the worst; the sensation of new teeth forcing their way through her gums was always going to be disturbing, no matter how many times it happened—and gave herself a minute to recover.

Just a minute, though. She couldn’t stay too long.

Leah had to keep moving. She didn’t know how much time she had but she couldn’t bring herself to be generous in her estimation; her optimism had gone out the window a very long time ago. As soon as her legs would support her, she was pushing off down the alley again.

The sight that met her when she rounded the corner was not an unfamiliar one: blood spattered across the cracked pavement and boarded up storefronts, bodies left where they’d fallen, all visible pockets turned out and notably empty. If she weren’t still a bit unsteady on her feet, Leah would have held her breath again just to avoid the overpowering copper tang and sour bile smell of the guy with his stomach torn open. As it was, she just swallowed down her gag reflex, stepped over the limp arm flung across her path, and kept heading north.

That was all the other omega had been able to tell her. The north quadrant of the city, she’d said, probably somewhere on the east side of it. Don’t bother looking for him; he’ll find you.

Leah was counting on that last bit because she had absolutely no idea what she would do if he didn’t. She had never been very good at scavenger hunts as a kid, and those at least had had actual clues to follow. Now she was wandering blind.

And it was getting dark. Not that that mattered much, what with the improved night vision and all. Spontaneous werewolfism had _a few_ perks, at least. But nightfall always brought out the crazies, and that was twice as true nowadays when most of _them_ had night vision too. She needed to find somewhere to hole up for the night if she wanted to live long enough to continue her search in the morning.

She found her way to what used to be a pharmacy, judging by the stench of chemicals that lingered on the empty shelves to burn her sensitive nose. There were no fresh scents that she could pick up, though, so no one had been in there in a long time. With nothing left for anyone to loot, it would be as good a place as any to hide. She would make a quick lap of the block just to be safe, keep an ear and a nostril open for anyone in the area, and then she would try to get a few hours of sleep.

She only made it two streets over.

The whiz of an arrow seemed to come before the twang of the bowstring, but neither gave Leah enough time to react before the hood of her sweatshirt was skewered. The force of it dragged her sideways into a wall, the arrowhead embedded in the brick keeping her pinned unless she wanted to tear apart her only piece of warm clothing to escape.

The shivery, prickly-hot rush of the shift came over her, rabid strength pounding through her veins, savage and heady. Leah almost fought against the feeling out of habit, but when she was under attack was the only time she accepted the change. It would be a shame to lose the sweatshirt but being cold, she reminded herself, was a damn sight better than being dead, and she could always steal another one after the fight if she survived it.

Except that her attacker was _fast,_ faster than any human had a right to be even though there was no scent of wolf or coyote or wendigo or any other flavor of supernatural creature on the air. There was just an arm reaching over Leah’s shoulder and a serrated knife pressed against her throat barely a second after a perfectly steady heartbeat met her ear.

Leah froze. Every animal instinct screamed at her to attack, fingertips itching around her claws, but the prick of the knife in the soft hollow behind her jaw was a very convincing deterrent.

It didn’t cut, though.

Another second passed and her jugular was still intact, which didn’t make a damn bit of sense because her attacker could only be one person, and the Archer wasn’t known for her mercy. Of course, the Archer wasn’t known for missing her target either, and the arrow had gone through Leah’s hood, not her heart.

It took two tries for Leah to speak, her mouth dry and clumsy with fangs.

“You’re not here to kill me?”

The knife pressed in closer, a threat and a warning. The edge didn’t break skin, but the knife must have been made of silver because it _burned._

“If I were,” the Archer said, breath hot against the shell of Leah’s ear, “you’d already be dead. I think you know that.”

Leah would have nodded, but that didn’t seem like a very good idea in her current circumstances. She swallowed hard and the knife caught on the sensitive skin of her throat, stinging.

“I’m—”

It came out as more of a squeak and, damn it, Leah had really hoped she would be better under pressure than this. She’d be embarrassed if she weren’t already so terrified.

“I’m looking for the Emissary,” she forced out.

In one quick, fluid, and very forceful motion, the Archer liberated her arrow from the wall—and there went the hood with it, torn to shreds, thanks so much for that—yanked Leah around, and shoved her against the wall instead, knife pressed back up under Leah’s chin before she could even think to resist. Not that she would have resisted if she’d had the time to, and not only because the threat of a silver blade being embedded somewhere unpleasant and probably lethal was very real.

This was _the Archer,_ the third most dangerous person in the city, the region, and probably the entire country. Or maybe that was hyperbole, the exaggeration that came with mystique and anonymity. But she looked pretty damn dangerous. She was taller than Leah by a bit, dressed all in a sort of mottled black-and-grey that blended seamlessly with the shadows behind her so that Leah had trouble focusing in on her when she was less than a foot away. There was an impressive bow slung across her back, the fletched ends of a quiver of arrows showing over her shoulder, and a hood pulled low over her face to hide it from view.

All combined, it screamed _do not cross me or I will put an arrow in your face and disappear into the night without a trace and no one will ever find your body._

Leah really hoped that searching for the Emissary was not enough to warrant getting an arrow in the face.

“I know who you’re looking for,” the Archer hissed. “The question is _why._ ”

Okay, so not getting shot just yet, at least. Questions first instead of shooting. This was off to a good start. Leah could work with this.

“I need his help,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “There’s a—”

“ _Everybody_ thinks they need his help,” the Archer cut her off. “What makes you so special?”

“It’s not for me!” Leah hurried on. “There’s a man, a few hours out of town. He was injured or sick or something, I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with him. He just said that he had a message for the Emissary and I needed to make sure it got to him as quickly as possible.”

The Archer’s head tilted, the fabric of her hood rustling quietly.

“A message.”

Leah couldn’t tell if the Archer sounded intrigued or skeptical. But there was still no stabbing going on, and the longer they went without stabbing the more confident she became that she would survive this encounter. Her heart was still about to beat out of her chest with fear but she did manage to force the shift back, claws retracting, features reforming into something resembling normal.

“Yes,” Leah said, once there were no more fangs in the way. “He made it sound pretty important and kind of time sensitive.”

“Then you’d best spit it out.”

Leah hesitated.

“Look, miss...Archer, um...I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but this guy was pretty insistent that I deliver the message straight to the Emissary,” she said. “He said only the Emissary would understand what it really meant.”

And the knife was back with a vengeance, the flat of it pressed against Leah’s throat and the sharp edge digging dangerously into the soft, eminently vulnerable underside of her chin, forcing her head up. Leah whimpered, her hope of survival plummeting again, but she held back the shift with great effort.

“If the Emissary will understand it,” the Archer said with all the patience of a coiled snake, “then I will understand it. You have ten seconds.”

Leah didn’t know if it was ten seconds to make her case before the Archer stopped listening and left, or ten seconds until the Archer stopped toying with her and finally put that knife to good use. Neither were favorable outcomes and she lost the fight against her claws, scrabbling against the brick behind her like that might actually do her some kind of good.

As if _anything_ would do her any good when the Archer— _The_ fucking _Archer_ —had her pinned and, oh god, she didn’t want to die. She had made it through the whole goddamn nightmare that was the last six years only to get killed by a would-be-might-actually-be assassin in a fucking back alley of a ruined city all for the sake of some stranger’s cryptic fucking message. That was the _last_ time she ever tried to help a strange man on the side of the road.

Last time she would ever do anything at all, probably, because she was going to die right here, right now. The Archer was waiting. Ten seconds, fuck, how many were left?

“Okay, okay, okay!” Leah managed to gasp out, painfully aware that her panicking had already cost her precious time. “Here’s the message, okay, here it is: the guy said to tell the Emissary that...Sourwolf says the Honest Man is still alive! That’s all he said, I swear, he—”

The absence of pressure all along her front shocked Leah into silence. The Archer’s movement was too abrupt and surprising for her to even register that the threat of the knife was gone too, that there was nothing stopping her from getting the hell out of there. She’d done what she had promised to do, passed on the stupid message, and now there was no reason for her not to escape while she had the chance, right? That would be the smart thing to do, just make a break for it, wash her hands of the whole damn thing.

But she didn’t. Leah stayed right where she was, hardly daring to breathe lest she bring the Archer’s wrath down on her again but too intrigued to flee now and give up finding out why the message would garner such a reaction.

The Archer was still as well, her grip on the knife gone slack. It was hard to get a read on her when her face was covered, but her shock was obvious anyway. She was so shocked that she would have let her quarry get away in that moment—and _no one_ got away from the Archer, not unless she wanted them to.

“Say that again.”

Leah almost didn’t hear it, the Archer’s voice gone thin and shaky. It took another, more forceful command to get Leah to repeat the message.

The Archer sheathed her knife with some difficulty, trembling too much to hold it steady any longer, and then covered her mouth with both hands. She didn’t seem half as imposing as she had a moment ago, now that she was just standing instead of looming and threatening. That didn’t stop Leah from jumping when she spoke again.

“This man,” the Archer said. “The one who gave you this message. What was his name? Did he tell you?”

“No,” Leah said with a shake of her head. “No, he wouldn’t give me a name. He said he might still have enemies and he didn’t want to draw their attention.”

The Archer nodded like that made sense, like she knew who the man was anyway and thought that was perfectly in character. Then, after a deep breath, she gave herself a visible shake, sloughing off her surprise like so much rainwater and pulling back on her no-nonsense attitude. Without another word, she turned and took a running leap toward the building opposite them, finding hand- and foot-holds with easy precision even in the failing light of evening.

Leah watched her climb, mouth hanging open. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved to see the frightening woman’s back or stung by the obvious dismissal. Was Leah’s part in the whole affair over now? She’d done her good deed and now it was time to return to the abandoned pharmacy and go back to spending her days just trying not to die?

“Bring my arrow with you on the way up.”

The Archer was crouched on the lip of the roof, shadowed face turned down toward where Leah was still leaning. It took an embarrassingly long time for the meaning of the words to filter through to Leah. When it did, she snatched the abandoned arrow off the ground at her feet and held it up.

“You want me to, uh...you want me to follow you?” she asked, just for clarification.

The Archer didn’t bother answering. Leah figured that was answer enough in itself, and also an implicit judgment of her intellect that she didn’t appreciate. She scrambled up the wall as quickly as she could anyway, which wasn’t nearly as fast as the Archer despite Leah’s supposedly superior sight, strength, and reflexes.

The Archer took her arrow back, returned it to its quiver, and set off across the rooftops, leaving Leah to trail after her and wonder for the millionth time in the last half hour alone what exactly she had gotten herself into when she stopped to talk to that man.

“So...where exactly are we going?” she asked.

“Where do you think? To see the Emissary.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Leah didn’t know how long they spent scaling buildings and leaping across rooftops, but then she’d never had a very good grasp of time and she’d abandoned her old wristwatch months ago when it had finally run out of battery. It couldn’t have been too long; by the time night fell in earnest they had migrated down to solid ground again, and then they were skulking through even tighter alleys, ducking across empty streets, wending their way further into the heart of the city.

Leah stayed close behind the Archer, sure that if she lost sight of her once she would never be able to find her again. Honestly, she would’ve stayed even closer than she did, but she had a feeling that stepping on the Archer’s heel would put her in danger of being shot again, but for real this time. So she did maintain a moderate distance, and she kept any and all questions to herself in the hopes that they would be answered later, though she did acknowledge and accept the sad possibility that no one would bother to tell her anything.

For all that the Archer was damn near silent and invisible, her presence seemed to radiate for blocks. In Leah’s experience, it was impossible to navigate the city at night without running into at least four people—or things—that wanted to harm you in one way or another, but now there was nothing. It sort of felt like that moment out in the woods when all the birds and little woodland creatures went quiet because a predator was nearby. She figured that wasn’t too bad of an analogy here and a shiver went down her spine; she might be an omega, the lowest of the low where werewolves were concerned, but she was still not used to feeling like prey.

Without the ambient noise of fighting and looting that usually filled the air, the night was almost oppressively quiet, broken only by their own breathing, the steady thump of their heartbeats, the careful tap of their footsteps on the pavement.

And a buzz.

Leah thought she was imagining it at first, or that it was a particularly hardy bug that had survived the recent drop in temperature, but it was too steady for that. Steady and growing, pitched just right to make a whine of protest build in her throat. She rubbed at her ears and cast around for the source, for _anything_ that might be making that godawful noise, but there was nothing. They were in the most derelict part of the city, surrounded by the ruins of old office buildings, every one of them abandoned and dark and not even fit to provide shelter in a storm.

The Archer glanced back at Leah when her whine escaped.

“That’ll be the wards,” she said. “Sorry about those. The noise turns most supernatural beings away before they even realize they’re hearing it. It’s subsonic for humans and a few others, but the area’s reputation is enough to keep them away too. Don’t worry. It’ll go away once we reach where we’re going.”

Leah sure hoped so, or else her ears were liable to start bleeding. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and lamented, not for the first time, that she couldn’t figure out how to turn _off_ her enhanced senses.

And then, quite suddenly, it was gone. From one moment to the next, just gone, leaving a ringing silence in its wake that was nearly as deafening as the buzzing itself.

Leah was so taken aback by the change that she stumbled over something in her path: a small, flat stone stuck fast to the asphalt of the road, dark enough to blend in. One of many such stones, she saw, all lined up across the road and leading off between the buildings on both sides. If she squinted, she thought she could make out scratches on the stones’ surfaces. Symbols? She didn’t recognize them, but they had to be some kind of magic if these were responsible for that noise.

And evidently a whole lot more.

Leah looked up to find a completely different view from when she had looked down. Brighter, for one thing, like these buildings might have working electricity. And the buildings themselves weren’t burnt out, smashed up shells anymore, but something resembling actual, stable structures. Some of them had full roofs and even non-broken windows, though most of those were blocked out by heavy, dark-colored curtains.

This magical restoration only extended for a block, maybe four or five buildings in total, and none of them were exactly picture-perfect, but it was the most intact display of civilization Leah had seen in a long time. Her first pitiful reaction was to wonder if they had hot showers in there somewhere and if they would let her use one. Her second was to rush for the nearest building like a moth to flame, but she veered off course when she realized the Archer was aiming more toward the middle of the cluster.

Leah couldn’t tell what the building used to be. There might have been signage on it somewhere, years ago, but any such distinguishing feature had gotten torn down or scratched off since then. Now it was just a nondescript three storey of brick and cement with a thick wooden door that looked much newer than the rest of it. The door frame was covered in those same sort of symbols from the perimeter of pebbles stuck so firmly to the ground that even a kick from a werewolf couldn’t dislodge them.

More magic, Leah guessed.

Confirmation came when the Archer pressed her palm flat against the door and it lit up like a Christmas tree before swinging open all on its own.

The Archer led the way inside, down a long hallway, through a large room full of boxes and crates with no labels on them, up two flights of mostly-intact stairs, and down another hallway. They passed a few other people on the way, busy-looking people with grim faces and the occasional weapon strapped somewhere on their person, but no one gave them more than a suspicious glance.

The hallway was lined with doors, some closed, some hanging off their hinges, some absent entirely to reveal what might have been conference rooms once upon a time, but the Archer paid no mind to any of those. She headed straight for the door at the very end of the hall, surrounded by more symbols that lit up at the Archer’s touch.

This door swung open like the last had and it hit Leah out of nowhere: a dozen heartbeats she hadn’t been able to hear before, the murmur of voices and rustle of clothing and shuffle of papers, the concentrated scent that came with a lot of people in an enclosed space. She couldn’t stop herself from jerking away from the sudden onslaught, the influx of sensory information overwhelming—almost _painful_ —in its intensity.

In all actuality it was probably nothing, just the soft conversation of a few handfuls of people, but to have it all come out of nowhere like that was a shock to her system. And this happened sometimes, this overload where it felt like every dial had been turned up to twelve and the walls were closing in on her and it was just too _much._ It had been bad enough when she was human but as a werewolf it was excruciating.

By the time the roar died down enough for Leah to be conscious of her surroundings again, there were eyes on her. That probably shouldn’t have been a surprise considering she was an intruder here, and also she was just frozen, cringing in an open doorway, probably reeking of irrational fear and pain. She couldn’t bring herself to move, though, not when everyone was _staring_ at her like she would either snap and kill them all or be their next meal, and this was probably the worst possible time to wolf out but everything was still too _close_ and her heart was racing and her fingers were itching to pop claws and—

“It’s been a while since you brought back a guest.”

The voice was low and hoarse, but it carried. All at once, the muttering and fidgeting of the room’s occupants stopped. The eyes on Leah looked away, turning toward a far corner of the room, and the small crowd fell back to clear the way.

The speaker didn’t look much different from anyone else there. On the tall side of average, broad-shouldered but not particularly muscled, a mess of brown hair. Dirty jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, a canvas jacket. There was a scar along the side of his neck, thick and white, that extended past his collar. Nothing about him really said _leader_ except the way the others reacted to him, like his word carried weight. Like anything he said was worth listening to, even a simple, innocuous comment like that.

He wasn’t facing them, hadn’t even looked up from the sheaf of paper in his hands, but it was obvious that he was addressing the Archer. He turned a page and shook his head absently before handing the papers off to the young man closest to him. When he looked up, Leah saw that there were scars on his face too, three thin ones that skipped from above his left eye, across his nose, all the way down to the right side of his jaw. There was a half-smile on his lips, but it didn’t look amused.

“And it’s been even longer,” he went on, “since you brought back a guest without clearing it with me first.”

On the surface, his tone was light, casual. And yet there was something almost accusatory about it, something sharp that demanded an explanation. Leah found herself taking a step back, away from the object of his displeasure lest she get caught in the crossfire.

The Archer didn’t cower. She just pushed back her hood. It pooled around her shoulders to reveal a woman who was strikingly pretty, pale and strong-jawed, with dark hair pulled up in a tight bun. She held her head high as she faced the Emissary—because it couldn’t be anyone else, could it?—and apparently she was out of her mind because she didn’t look intimidated at all, not like the rest of the crowd.

“Trust me,” she said simply. “You’ll want to meet this one.”

Leah damn near bolted when the Emissary turned his dark eyes on her. She swallowed hard as he looked her up and down, feeling x-rayed down to her very bones, and she didn’t breathe again until he looked away.

“Leave us,” he said to the room at large, and immediately people began filing out. Leah finally gathered the fortitude to remove herself from the door when the Emissary raised an eyebrow at her, though she had to wage a battle with her reluctance to get any closer to the man than she had to.

The Emissary was even more of a legend than the Archer. They were partners, true, and they were both fearsome figures in and of themselves, but everybody knew that the Emissary was the more dangerous of the two. The magic man, the guardian of Beacon Hills, the only one to have come face to face with the Warlock and walk away. Some people claimed he didn’t exist, that he was a myth, because no one seemed to know who he was or even what he looked like.

Or maybe the people who knew just weren’t telling, and Leah couldn’t blame them; she couldn’t imagine doing anything to cross the man advancing on her now. He didn’t address her directly, even as he stopped right in front of her. Instead he turned back to the Archer.

“What’s so important that you had to bring a stranger into Headquarters without authorization?” he asked.

“We might have a situation on our hands.”

“I hate situations, Alli. You know that.”

“I’m pretty sure you won’t hate this one.”

The Emissary’s jaw clenched, his patience for beating around the bush apparently running out, and he crossed his arms over his chest before leveling Leah with another of those penetrating looks.

“So?” he said. “What’s my situation?”

Leah opened her mouth with every intention of telling him what she had gone to all this trouble to tell him, but her mind was blank. The message hadn’t made any sense to her to begin with and the nonsense words wouldn’t come to her now. No words would come to her at all when the Emissary was staring her down like that. She hadn’t felt this pinned even when there was a literal arrow holding her in place. Floundering, she found herself looking to the Archer for help.

The Archer—Alli, the Emissary had called her—rolled her eyes and stepped forward to take over.

“Derek and Scott are alive.”

The Emissary turned to her so quickly it had to have hurt his neck, features slack with disbelief. Then he was shaking his head, his face closing off and his entire body tensing like he was braced for a blow.

“No,” he said roughly. “No, they’re dead. They’ve been dead for years.”

“Presumed dead,” Alli corrected him. “They’ve been _missing_ for years and we had no reason to think they _weren’t_ dead when—”

“When all evidence and all intel said they should be,” the Emissary snapped. “That’s what _happens_ when you get snatched by the Warlock, Allison: you end up dead. What the hell could possibly convince you otherwise now? After all these years?”

Allison turned to Leah and said, “Tell him what you told me.”

This time the Emissary’s gaze was so intense, the message found its way to Leah’s lips out of sheer self-preservation instinct.

“Sourwolf says that the Honest Man is still alive.”

Maybe it was a good thing the Emissary had braced for impact because the words had even more of an effect on him than they’d had on the Archer when she had first heard them. He staggered backwards, mouth open, and his face drained of its color like he had seen a ghost. Maybe he had, in a way. His hands found their way into his hair, raking through the messy strands and then gripping tight.

“That’s not possible,” he said weakly.

“No one else would know to call them that,” Allison said. “We haven’t used those silly codenames in years. Not since—”

The Emissary cut her off with a sharp gesture, his eyes screwed shut, and Leah had the distinct feeling that she was intruding. Unfortunately, moving now would only draw more attention to her, so she just stayed very still and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The worst part was the scent. Not the natural scent of them, but the emotional one, that bizarre combination of senses that somehow imprinted itself into Leah’s brain and told her things that she had no right knowing. Like how completely and utterly grief-stricken the Emissary was at the very mention of these people. It was a thick, heavy scent that settled around him like a fog, spiked through with old anger like the rumble of thunder and tang of lightning, and there was no way to ignore it no matter how much Leah wanted to.

It left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth and made her heart clench in her chest, a sympathetic response that threatened to drag up everything she didn’t want to think about. She dug her fingernails—the human ones, not her claws—into her palms to distract herself, to keep her from dwelling on borrowed pain. She had her own grief to deal with, damn it, and it wasn’t fair that she had to be subjected to anyone else’s.

“Stiles,” Allison said, gentle and coaxing on what Leah took to be the Emissary’s real name. “They’re alive. Scott and Derek, they’re _alive._ ”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

The Emissary—Stiles—shook his head again, harder this time, like he was trying to shake loose the pall of despair and disbelief and get himself thinking right again.

“You,” he said, pointing to Leah. “Where did you get this information? Who gave you the message?”

“Just some guy I met yesterday,” she said with a helpless shrug. “He didn’t give me a name.”

“No, of course he wouldn’t. What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, he, uh...he had dark hair,” Leah offered up with a wince. “I think he was tall, but it was hard to tell. He wasn’t standing up straight; he might have been hurt.”

“Light eyes?” Stiles pressed. “Thick eyebrows?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

“That’s Derek,” Allison said with a smile, and her eyes were shiny like she might cry. She smelled less like grief and more tangy-sweet, something like joy or hope. It wasn’t a scent Leah had encountered many times in recent years. It tickled at her nose, no less intrusive than the grief and twice as uncomfortable to feel secondhand, like she was stealing something fragile.

A hand on Leah’s shoulder startled her.

“Where is he?” Stiles asked, gripping just a bit too tight, fingertips biting into the muscle.

“He was just outside of town,” Leah told him. “On the west side. Past where the market sets up on Tuesdays, closer to the stream.”

“Out by the woods, you mean,” Allison said, and Leah nodded.

Stiles nodded too, like that meant something to him. Then he frowned at Leah as if he were just now seeing her for the first time.

“Why did he send you?” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “If he’s alive and nearby, he should be here himself.”

“He didn’t know where to find you,” Leah said, though she wasn’t entirely sure he had actually been looking for an answer. “No one does. You’re pretty effectively hidden here.”

“Derek could find us,” Stiles said firmly. “He could always find me, could smell me from a mile away no matter how many wards I had up even if he wasn’t keyed into them. If he’s alive and free, he should have tracked me down by now.”

It was Leah’s turn to frown; that didn’t make any sense.

“She said he was hurt,” Allison cut in before Leah could.

“She said he was hurt yesterday. He should’ve healed by now,” Stiles said. “Or if not, then he should be healed soon. I’ve never known him to be put out of the running for more than a few days, no matter how badly he was injured.”

“Okay, wait,” Leah finally said, loud enough to get both their attention. She quailed under their combined stares, but something was not adding up here and she had to say something. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I’m not so sure we’re talking about the same person anymore.”

The two of them exchanged a look.

“We have to be,” Stiles said. “The description of the man you met—that was Derek to the letter. And no one else could have given you that message. Why do you say otherwise?”

Leah bit her lip. God, she really hoped she was wrong, that there was another explanation or something, _anything._ Otherwise she was going to have two very upset, very dangerous people to contend with. But she couldn’t not tell them. If there really was some kind of misunderstanding here, then they needed to know. They deserved to know.

“This Derek you’re talking about,” she said carefully. “He was a werewolf?”

“Yes,” Allison said slowly, suspiciously. “A beta. Why do you ask that?”

Fuck.

“Because the man who gave me the message wasn’t,” Leah said. “He was human.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The Emissary’s headquarters did have showers and Leah almost cried. Whether the tears were from relief for the rare blessing that was water not scooped out of a chilly stream or from the sheer stress of the last few hours was up for debate, but Leah was too exhausted to care one way or the other. Anything that got her away from people and noise and scents and emotions that weren’t hers. If she’d had to stay in that room for one more minute, listening to them argue and smelling their panic and confusion, she might have had a breakdown. She had never been so grateful to be kicked out of somewhere before.

The Archer had mercifully sent for someone to take her to where she could get cleaned up, the young man that Stiles had handed his papers off to before starting the interrogation. He introduced himself as Mason with a smile and a handshake. Then he led her downstairs to the communal showers and showed her where all the necessary things were before leaving her alone there to hurry back to whatever he had been doing before.

That was fine. He was probably very busy. Everybody here looked very busy, though Leah had no idea what most of them were supposed to be doing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, so she just made sure the door was locked and all the windows were boarded up securely.

Someone had managed to rig running water into an old conference room on the first floor that had had its carpeting ripped up, plain concrete cold against her feet. The shower heads, lined up against one wall with curtains strung on fishing line in between, may have been made out of tin cans with holes poked in the bottoms, but they served their purpose well enough. It didn’t matter that the water, when it worked its way through the ramshackle pipes, wasn’t much more than lukewarm; it was heaven.

Leah peeled her clothes off with some difficulty. It had been a depressingly long time since she’d last had the opportunity to wash them, considering she didn’t have any spares at the moment and it was too cold to run around naked waiting for them to dry, and her jeans were grimy enough to stand up on their own. She’d been meaning to find something else, but it wasn’t like there were fully stocked department stores on every corner anymore.

At least, not around here, there weren’t. Maybe there was still a Macy’s open for business a few states over, a few Walmarts that had managed to survive this long. Maybe some places even had McDonald’s and consistent electricity and an intact police force that succeeded in keeping order. Maybe in other parts of the country things were still functioning in some approximation of how they used to, but this region had been hit the hardest and none of that was left. Beacon Hills was the epicenter, the source of it all, Ground Zero of the fucking supernatural apocalypse.

Leah had tried to get out, she really had. She had made a run for the state line in hopes of finding somewhere better, somewhere safer, but they weren’t letting anyone like her through. She didn’t know if it was a governmental mandate put in place to protect the rest of the country or if the Hunters had decided on their own that this region needed to be quarantined and assigned themselves as the border patrol, but it hardly mattered who was doing the shooting when the end result was the same: they were trapped here.

Leah scrubbed herself twice over from head to toe, scratching at the grime on her skin and using a ration of actual soap to make her hair less of a giant matted mess. She would say it made her feel more human but it would be a lie. She _wasn’t_ human. If she had been, they would’ve let her over the fucking border, wrapped her up in blankets and taken her far away from this hellhole instead of aiming shotguns loaded with wolfsbane at her head.

If she were still human, she wouldn’t be alone. She would be at home with her family, hugging her mother and father, telling her little brother that everything would be okay. And she wouldn’t spend every hour of every day looking over her shoulder, avoiding the rogue werewolf packs that ran the streets like they were the fucking mafia, ducking the Hunters intent on wiping them out, waiting for the Warlock to pick her up and carry her off like he had so many others.

Even under the warm spray, Leah shivered. If the Emissary and the Archer were legends, then the Warlock was a nightmare. He was the boogeyman, the monster under the bed, the thing lurking in every shadow and just around every corner. Some said he was a demon, others just a man driven mad by his own quest for power. Everyone agreed that he was the one responsible.

By whatever means, it was the Warlock’s fault that Leah and countless other innocent people just like her had simply woken up one day as something _else,_ something _other._ Werewolves and werecoyotes, kitsunes and wendigos, banshees and sirens, and a hundred other kinds. All across the country, a giant spike in supernatural creatures, all of them spawned out of nowhere with no explanation and no way to stop it. Even now, six years from the first wave, it still happened sometimes. Spontaneous transformations, no bite needed, courtesy of the Warlock and whatever twisted fucking magic he had wrought to bring the country to its knees.

Leah leaned her forehead against the wall, forcing herself to take slow breaths deep enough to make her head spin. Panicking had never done her any good before and it wouldn’t do her any good now, no matter how much indulging in a good freak out while she had the opportunity appealed to her. She had to hold herself together right now because, if half of what she had gleaned from Stiles’ and Allison’s argument was true, then the situation was worse than she had ever imagined.

It had been one thing when they were just rumors. People talked all the time, they gossiped and told stories and exaggerated for shock value, so hearing about the big bad Warlock who would steal you away in the night to work his evil spells on you was alarming but, taken as it was with a grain of salt, ultimately waved off as some kind of cautionary tale. And the story of how the Emissary had risen up to protect the city, fighting the Warlock in an epic duel, forcing him out of Beacon Hills and into retreat, was just a fable meant to give the people who were stuck there a hero they could pin their fragile hopes on.

But it was all true. Stiles had said so himself, that the Warlock really was taking people and that those people ended up dead. Or at least, they _usually_ ended up dead.

What Leah had said about that Derek guy had sent the Emissary into a tailspin. It had been kind of hard to follow what with all the yelling, most of which came out in half-sentences or was cut off by Allison alternately trying to calm him down and yelling back at him, but it seemed like there was definitely some kind of magic going on. The Warlock was using the people he took for something, that much was certain, but maybe it wasn’t in the way they had thought. Not if Derek had ended up _human._

“ _Human,_ Allison!” Stiles had shouted with a definite tinge of hysteria, and Leah had already had her back to the wall, as far away from him as she could get. “How did that even _happen?_ That’s not how the spell usually works!”

“Maybe something went wrong?” Allison had asked. “If the draw was botched—”

“The Warlock doesn’t botch things,” Stiles had snapped, pacing and tugging at his hair. “He’s too good for that. And it’s been four years, for fuck’s sake, _four years._ We’re missing something.”

“Derek will be able to tell us. Tomorrow we’ll track him down and he’ll—”

Stiles had looked horrified.

“No, no, no, we need to go _now,_ ” he had said. “We can’t wait until tomorrow, we need to find him now. Derek’s out there right now!”

“Stiles, it’s the middle of the night,” she’d reasoned. “He’s survived his entire life up to this point, he will make it through a few more hours until we can travel safely.”

“That was as a werewolf, Allison!” Stiles had shouted. “Derek is human now. Derek can’t survive as a human, he doesn’t know _how!_ ”

That had been about the time Leah had squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears, wishing fervently that she had more hands so that she could hold her nose too and block out the storm of chemosignals. As soon as the warded door had been slammed shut behind her, all sensory information from inside the room had been cut off and it had felt like coming up from underwater.

Speaking of water, Leah was surprised that no one had come to bang on the door and bitch at her for using up all their precious warm water by now. One last rinse and she turned the shower off, watching forlornly as the spray trickled off to nothing. She headed to the actual bathroom that Mason had pointed out, just off the shower room and barely large enough for a toilet, a sink, and a closet of supplies. She dug up a threadbare towel and dried off, squeezing the water out of her hair before wrapping the damp towel around her torso.

She caught sight of herself in the cracked mirror over the sink and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her face was thin like it had never been when she’d had regular access to good food, cheeks sunken and almost gaunt. Her freshly washed hair still looked greyish instead of its old blonde and only so much of that could be attributed to the thin, inconsistent light from the weak bulb overhead. Dark shadows ringed her eyes like bruises and she leaned forward against her better judgment, reaching out to trace the reflection of them.

God, how had she become this? It wasn’t a face she recognized, not anymore. She wasn’t old enough to look this weary, this broken down, and it wasn’t fair. She had been a happy teenage girl once and now there was nothing left of her but a hunted animal. The urge to smash the mirror leapt in her and with it came a flash of yellow, dull brown eyes subsumed by unnatural gold, and Leah flinched backward. Her sudden anger sank under the weight of a familiar nausea and she looked away.

A knock on the half-closed bathroom door made her jump, eyes flashing again on some sort of instinct. She clutched the towel tighter around her chest and turned to find Allison, leaning her shoulder against the door frame with her eyes averted. The Archer had let her hair down sometime in the last hour and it tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of tired curls. There was a bundle tucked under her arm. After a sidelong glance to make sure Leah was relatively decent, she smiled.

“I brought you something to change into,” she said, hefting the bundle. “It looked like you could use new set of clothes. Well, not _new._ But clean, at least.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks.”

Leah took the bundle from her, unrolling it to find a long-sleeved black shirt, a pair of cargo pants that promised to be a little too big on her, a belt, and—praise _Jesus—_ a bra and a pair of underwear. Modesty went out the window in the face of clean underwear and she dropped the towel without the slightest concern for the woman watching her, getting dressed in record time and reveling in the feeling of clean cotton sliding over clean skin.

“I’m sorry.”

Leah looked up from pulling on her own raggedy shoes, surprised and a little bit confused.

“For being so rough with you earlier today,” Allison clarified. “It’s not often that strangers come to us on good terms and we learned early on not to trust people too quickly. Of course, that pessimism may have served us well in the past, but I’m starting to think we’ve moved past a healthy skepticism and firmly into paranoia.”

“It’s fine,” Leah said. “I get it.”

It’s not like _she_ was inclined toward trusting people either. Trust was a dangerous thing.

Allison shook her head though.

“We never even got your name,” she pointed out. “Obviously our social skills have atrophied from lack of use.”

Leah hadn’t even realized. Honestly, she hadn’t thought it mattered. _She_ wasn’t what was important in this situation. She would probably never see these people again, so what did it matter if they knew anything at all about her? Still, Allison seemed to be waiting, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

“Leah. I’m Leah Collins.”

She almost held out her hand to shake but that felt too weirdly formal and inappropriate, like an outgrown relic of civilized society.

Allison smiled at her and, honestly, it was criminal that she managed to look so pretty when it was obvious that she was almost as worn down as Leah was.

“I’m Allison,” she offered, then rolled her eyes. “But you probably already figured that out. Allison Argent, anyway. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too, I guess.”

Leah hadn’t had to endure an awkward silence in years. It was strangely satisfying in a perverse kind of way.

“Come on,” Allison said finally, jerking her head over her shoulder. “You’re probably hungry and tired. We’ll go grab you a quick bite to eat.”

Leah followed her obediently out the door, through the shower room, and into the hallway. They made their way back to the room full of crates. There were more of them now than there were an hour or two ago and Mason was there with a clipboard, tapping a stubby pencil on various crates and making marks on what Leah assumed was an inventory of some kind. He looked up when Allison came in and gave her a weary smile.

“All accounted for,” he said, holding up the clipboard. “It’ll only last us a few weeks, though, and that’s a liberal estimate.”

“I know,” Allison said with a sigh. “I’ll write to Melissa. If she can get word out to Raf, then maybe he can get another batch of provisions across the border for us a little early. Think you and Liam can make it out to her?”

“If the Johnston pack comes under new management again in the next few days like we’re anticipating, we can probably sneak through while they restructure,” Mason said. “Otherwise we’ll have to go the long way and risk pissing off that batty banshee on the south side.”

Allison pried the top off the nearest crate and pulled out a can of peaches. She gave it a little shake.

“It’ll be worth it,” she said, “if we can get a few more shipments of these.”

Mason nodded and made another mark on his inventory before shuffling away down the line.

Allison produced a small knife from somewhere on her person, cutting away the top of the can. Then she held both can and knife out to Leah, who took them gratefully. It was tricky to stab the soft pieces of fruit while walking, but she wasn’t going to wait to eat until they were standing still and Allison was already moving again so she made it work. The peaches were juicy and sweet and by far the most delicious thing Leah had ever tasted and she had drained the can by the time they reached another set of conference rooms.

These were lined with cots, dozens of them, all set out in rows like a dormitory and laid with blankets and pillows that looked like they had been sewn together out of whatever scraps of fabric they could find.

“We sleep in shifts,” Allison told her. “So there’s always a few beds available. You’re welcome to use any of them. You should get a few good hours of sleep while you have the chance. We leave at first light.”

Leah almost dropped the can.

“W-wait. _We?_ ”

Allison gave her a funny look and reached out to take her knife back like she was worried Leah would drop that too and lose a toe.

“Of course,” she said. “We have to find Derek, and you were the last person to see him.”

“He won’t be where I left him,” Leah protested. “He said it was too exposed there and he had to move.”

“We know,” Allison said. “And that’s why we need you to come with us. We have an idea of where he might have gone but we might be wrong. And if we are, then we’ll need your help tracking him. We can’t follow his scent like you can.”

“Don’t you have other werewolves here? Ones you trust?” Leah asked, her arms wrapping around her stomach to quell the uneasiness there.

She didn’t want to follow Derek’s scent. Honestly, she didn’t want to smell him again at all. He had smelled like ozone and fear and pain and something sickly sweet that had stuck in her nose for hours after she had left him behind. Now she knew it was the scent of whatever awful magic the Warlock had worked on him. Following that trail was almost guaranteed to lead her into even more trouble, and she’d already had plenty of trouble lately.

“None of our wolves know his scent,” Allison said, and sadness wafted off of her like perfume. “Not anymore. It’s been too long.”

“What about a spell?” Leah asked instead, casting around for any other option. “The Emissary has powerful magic. He couldn’t work some kind of spell to find out where Derek is?”

“Not with the materials he has. He would need a piece of Derek’s body, like blood or hair, which he doesn’t have. And even if he had something like that left over from the last time we saw Derek, there’s no guarantee it would work now that he’s human.”

Allison frowned at Leah, looking her up and down. The scrutiny made Leah tense and fidget, flexing her fingers to rid herself of the claw-itch.

“You’re afraid of us.”

It didn’t sound like an accusation, just a simple statement of fact, but Leah flushed anyway. These people had done her so much good, had put food in her stomach and clothes on her back and taken her in off the street when they had no real reason to trust her, and here she was being an ungrateful ass making them feel bad for doing what they needed to do to survive. They were obviously very capable of violence, and maybe Allison had roughed her up and threatened her a little bit, but it was no worse than anything else Leah had endured and it didn’t seem like they actually intended her any harm.

She opened her mouth to protest, but Allison held up a hand.

“It’s okay,” she said easily, though she still smelled sad, maybe even disappointed. “I understand. Stiles and I have a certain...reputation, and I wish I could say it’s inaccurate, but that would be a lie. For all that we mean well, we are dangerous people and you don’t know us well enough to trust us yet. I can’t blame you for being afraid of us. You have every right to be.”

“I’m not afraid of you!” Leah insisted. She had a healthy fear of all the weapons, naturally, but ever since the hood had come off, Allison had been nothing but kind to her. She wasn’t afraid of Allison Argent. Of the Archer, a little bit, but not Allison.

A smile tugged at the corner of Allison’s mouth like maybe she believed her, but her dark eyes narrowed in a calculating sort of way and she tilted her head to the side.

“But you are afraid of him.”

 _That_ Leah couldn’t bring herself to deny. She just met Allison’s gaze straight on and said, “Aren’t you?”

Allison surprised her by _laughing,_ dimples pressing into her cheeks.

“Oh no!” she said, waving her hand. “God, no! I’ve known him far too long for that. I still remember him as the spazzy, hyperactive kid with a buzzcut he was when we met back in high school.”

Leah stared at her, unable to process that information. Her imagination gave out trying to picture the man she had met as anything but the intimidating figure he was today. The mental image simply did not compute.

Allison chuckled at her expression. She sat down on the nearest cot, leaning elbows against her knees and letting her hair cascade over her far shoulder so she could turn and look up at Leah.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “but Stiles wasn’t always the ‘great and powerful Emissary.’” She did air quotes with one hand, rolling her eyes like the whole mystique was ridiculous. “Neither of us started out this way. We were just trying to protect our home. Me and Stiles, Scott and Derek, and all the rest. Just a bunch of kids, really, doing whatever we could to make it through the day.”

Leah sank down onto the cot beside her, hands still wrapped around the empty can of peaches. She opened her mouth, changed her mind and closed it, then changed her mind again and pushed on.

“The rest?”

Because there had been plenty of people in that meeting they had busted in on earlier, but none of them had looked at Stiles like Allison did. Like they were his equal, like he was anything other than the Emissary, their fearless leader and greatest hope for the future. Leah hadn’t seen anyone else who seemed like they really knew _Stiles,_ and certainly not like they had known him since high school.

The heavy-bitter scent of grief answered her question as well as any words ever could and Leah almost regretted asking, but what Allison said was unexpected.

“Do you know what an emissary is?”

“Like...in general?” Leah asked.

Allison nodded.

“Uh...some kind of envoy, isn’t it?” If she remembered her history classes well enough from way back in the day. “Sort of like a liaison.”

“That’s what it is to humans,” Allison said. “It’s a little bit different for supernaturals. An emissary is a human member of a werewolf pack, usually a Druid or someone else with magical ability, who serves as an advisor. They help keep the pack stable and in touch with their humanity.”

“So Stiles was your pack’s emissary?”

“Long before any of us realized it, honestly.” Allison smiled down at her hands. “Stiles always made it his job to look after everybody, to make sure they were safe.”

“So what happened to them?” Leah asked, as if she didn’t already know.

“They’re dead.”

The new voice had Leah on the verge of shifting, heart in her throat and claws flicking out, because she hadn’t heard anyone coming. Stiles’ heartbeat was strangely muffled, like she was hearing it through layers of cotton even though he was leaning in the doorway just a few feet away, head down and arms crossed tightly over his chest once more. That seemed like his default pose.

“They’re not all dead,” Allison said, disapproving but not the least bit surprised by his sudden appearance.

“Dead or long gone, then,” Stiles amended. He leveled Allison with a very dark look, one that made Leah shudder a little before she could stop herself. “And we’d be getting two of them back as we speak if you hadn’t insisted on sleeping. If you’re just going to swap stories and braid each other’s hair all night, then we might as well head out now and stop wasting time.”

“We’re not going anywhere until daylight,” Allison reiterated, unphased. “So go to bed, Stiles. I’ll be up in a minute.”

How Allison could hold her ground against a glare that menacing, Leah would never know. After a momentary staring match, Stiles’ eyes flicked over onto her instead and Leah had the immediate urge to bare her neck in submission like she would to an alpha werewolf on a rampage. She held back the impulse, but she still let out a sigh of relief when he turned away and disappeared down the hallway toward the stairs.

Allison patted her leg in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring.

“Don’t worry about Stiles,” she said warmly. “I’m not saying that his bark is worse than his bite, just that he doesn’t bite as often as he wants you to think he does.”

Leah nodded like she believed that when she wasn’t entirely sure she did or ever would.

“We leave first thing,” Allison told her again, standing up and smoothing her hair away from her face. “It’ll probably be a long day, so get some sleep while you can.”

She followed in Stiles’ footsteps with one last smile and Leah was left alone, still clutching the peach can like some kind of lifeline. There was nothing for her to do but follow orders, so she put the can down on the floor beside her chosen cot, kicked off her shoes, and laid down. With the sounds of people and movement from all over the building unnaturally loud in her ears and impossible to ignore, it was a long time before sleep overtook her.


	2. the last thing that I want's for you to leave

They gave her a backpack. It had definitely seen better days and come through the worse ones with fraying straps and a zipper held together by safety pins, but they said it was hers if she wanted to keep it long-term. They stuffed it with one of the Frankenstein-ed blankets, two more cans of diced fruit, half a loaf of hard bread that someone had baked themselves in one of the other restored buildings on the block, and several pieces of turkey jerky.

Allison gave her a knife too, one of the big ones that couldn’t reasonably be used as a utensil and therefore only had one real purpose. Leah only accepted it because, as much as the thought of stabbing someone turned her stomach, the prospect of ripping their throat out with her teeth or tearing them open with her claws was twice as horrifying. She tucked the knife in a side pocket of the backpack and did her best to forget it was there.

She was just finishing up wrapping the worn-thin toes of her ratty old shoes with precious, precious duct tape, donated by a kindly middle-aged werewolf lady who had taken one look at the state of Leah's feet and tutted in disapproval, when she caught sight of Stiles striding determinedly past the dormitory...straight down the hallway and to the front door.

She thought for a second that maybe they had changed their minds about her coming along and were leaving without her—a prospect that was met with intensely mixed feelings—but then Allison appeared in the doorway Stiles had bypassed, hair once again pulled tight into a bun, and offered her a smile.

Leah let Allison take her by the arm and lead her out into the dim early morning sunlight, the sun itself just starting to peek its way over the uneven rooftops. Stiles was already halfway down the block, heading due west without bothering to wait for them or even make sure they were following. Leah frowned at his back, then at Allison, and then at the rune-covered Headquarters’ door as it shut behind them.

"Is this it?" she asked Allison. "I mean, none of the others are coming with us?"

"No. Just us."

Allison adjusted the angle of the bow once again slung across her back to better accommodate her own backpack and set off in Stiles' wake.

Leah had no choice but to follow or be left behind so she matched her stride to Allison's longer one.

"But he's going west," she felt the need to point out, leaning in close to whisper even though she knew the Emissary was too far away to overhear her questioning his plan.

"Yes, he is."

"And he expects us to make it through downtown with just the three of us?" Leah asked with no small bit of alarm. "Why just us? There were plenty of people in Headquarters. Why couldn't we bring more people with us on this little rescue mission?"

"They're all busy," Allison said with a shrug, apparently unconcerned that they were heading into the heart of disputed werewolf territory without at _least_ a small army at their backs. "Everybody working at Headquarters has a job to do, and their hands are full right now. We couldn't spare anyone for an impromptu city run, especially when we don't really know how long it will take."

They reached the warded perimeter and stepped over the line of pebbles across the road without breaking stride. Leah couldn't resist glancing back over her shoulder to watch the buildings flicker back into the dilapidated mirage she had seen upon first approaching, like an old-timey TV with bad reception. Then she tripped over a chunk of upheaved pavement because she wasn't looking where she was going, which would have torn a hole through the canvas upper of her shoe if it hadn't been for the newly applied protective layer of duct tape.

Swallowing her curse—one of the few real perks of being a werewolf: stubbed toes only hurt for a second or two—she hurried to catch up with Allison, whose long stride was quickly eating the distance between them and Stiles.

"So what exactly do you _do_ at Headquarters?" Leah asked when she was back in range, hooking her thumb into her backpack's straps as she fell in step with the other woman. "Calling it that makes it seem like it’s an organization of some kind, or a business."

Allison made a thoughtful noise. Her eyes scanned back and forth, skipping across every shadowed doorway and blind alley they passed without stopping, always on the lookout for possible threats even though her stance was relaxed. Every once in a while, the thumb of her left hand brushed over the grip of the knife tucked into a sheath high on her thigh, always ready for the draw.

"You could think of it like a business, I guess," she said. "But it might be more like a relief center, honestly. We're trying to keep the region functioning, or at least stable enough to survive for a while. It’s not easy, but we do what we can, considering the circumstances."

"What do you mean?" Leah asked. “What circumstances?”

"I mean the Hunters are trying to starve us out," Allison said and the sunny smile Leah had become accustomed to in just one night was taken over by the chilly focus of the Archer, that grimness that gave her such an aura of lethality.

"The barrier they set up keeps the Warlock and the bulk of the supernatural creatures he created from getting out to infiltrate and terrorize the rest of the country, yes," she said, "but it also keeps supply trucks from getting in. There are almost no factories running in this part of the state anymore, and with no in-house production and no trade from outside, it's only a matter of time before our reserves run dry completely and we're left with nothing to live off of.

“And that's exactly what they want,” she said bluntly, no sugar coating. “For all of us to starve to death or kill each other off. To them, we're nothing but patient zero in the plague that is the supernatural proliferation. They think the rest of the country can still be saved, but us? We're irredeemable."

Leah went cold all over, the growing warmth of the day unable to counteract the shiver of shock and horror that ran through her. She couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder as if a Hunter would be looming there, ready to strike her down where she stood.

It's not like she hadn't realized that practically all economic endeavors had come to a screeching halt by now. The department stores and fast food restaurants had been closed down for years, the grocery stores sold out and never restocked, even the hospital was used up and left behind ages ago. Things she used to just go out and buy at the minimart had become harder and harder to track down and purchase, or later barter for, until they were nowhere to be found anymore, but Leah had always assumed that someone somewhere was at least _trying_ to ship into the region.

She had figured that the shipments were being hijacked by the rogue werewolf packs, the violent ones that reveled in their bestial power and gave in to every primal instinct for the rush it gave them, or maybe that they were intercepted by the Warlock for whatever nefarious purpose. Or that they just never reached this far into the metaphorical blast zone, where half the roads had been ripped up by the literal shockwave that had started this whole nightmare.

She had never thought that the Hunters were deliberately cutting them off. She couldn't believe that anyone could be so callous. Sure, there were some dangerous creatures here that could stand to be taken out, but there were good people here too, people who didn't deserve to be treated like some kind of disease. This region was full of innocent humans, starving children of all breeds, and supernatural creatures who hadn’t asked to be what they were now. Thousands of people, most of whom just wanted to live out their lives somewhere safe and far away from here.

People like Leah.

"So you're trying to keep the region supplied?" Leah guessed, thinking back to Mason and his clipboard inventory. "Like all those crates of canned food?"

"Among other things," Allison said. "Clothes, toilet paper, feminine products, clean water, toothpaste and other toiletries. Even medicine, when we can get our hands on it, though it's really hard for us to get a hold of anything stronger than aspirin and maybe a few Epi-pens."

"And you just...what, hand it out on street corners?" Leah asked skeptically. She had certainly never come across someone handing out tampons on the street. Things would have been a lot easier for her the last few years if that had been the case.

Allison gave a little laugh.

"No, of course not. We take a lot of it to the marketplace," she said, referring to the swath of streets out by the far west edge of town that had become a sort of acknowledged zone of neutrality. There people and supernaturals of all breeds and affiliations could come together to search for or offer up goods and services, mostly bartering for what they needed now that there were no functioning banks or ATMs around to keep people flush with paper money.

Leah had only been there a few times herself—too many people and scents, loud and overwhelming. And for all that it was supposed to be neutral ground, it could still be dangerous if you were seen talking to the wrong people by even worse people. Leah preferred to keep to the outskirts where it was quieter and less populated, making the rounds of the nearby towns every few weeks but never staying in one place long enough to get drawn into any of the territory squabbles or local pack wars. The perennial omega was she.

"There are still a few functioning farms in the area, you know," Allison told her. "We take our non-perishables and non-food stuffs to the market and trade them for whatever fresh produce those farmers bring in. That gets it all into circulation, and it gets used or passed along in another trade. We do our best to get everything where it's most needed, but there's only so much we can do when so many groups around here don't exactly play well with others."

And wasn't _that_ an understatement. Some of the groups that occupied the city nowadays would rip your limbs off sooner than have a civil conversation, all for the sake of proving that they were the roughest, toughest, most brutal pack in the city. And that impulse wasn't unique to the werewolf packs either. Werecoyotes were more the loner type, but they were defensive and easily offended. The banshees all seemed to be a little unstable, to be honest, and the wendigos...well, the wendigos craved human flesh by nature. So they were best avoided no matter what mood they were in.

With the heavy concentration of volatile supernatural creatures being what it was, it was a miracle they had all lasted this long.

Leah hefted her backpack higher on her shoulders, hearing the clink of cans that meant she would definitely be having a meal that night—something that was altogether too infrequent for her and practically everyone else in the city these days—and looked ahead to the Emissary. He was just a short way ahead of them now as he led the way confidently through the deserted streets, burdened with a backpack just like hers and looking no different from any of the other men Leah passed from day to day but for his steady stride and raised head. The others were hunched and paranoid, struggling to survive, and Leah thought that maybe the Emissary’s organization really was the only thing keeping the region afloat for people like that.

"But if the Hunters are choking off the supply lines and preventing anything from getting across the border," Leah said, "then where are you getting your goods from?"

"We've got connections," Stiles said, near enough now that he didn't have to raise his voice to be heard. "Friends in high places, if you will."

"And by that," Allison said with a wry half-smile, "he means that we know a guy in the FBI. Special Agent Rafael McCall. And _he_ knows a few other people who are sympathetic enough to our cause to redirect a few shipments at a time and conveniently lose the paperwork."

"Then the shipments work their way through a long and very convoluted chain of carefully positioned allies," Stiles said, "and eventually make it down the line to Allison's father, Chris."

"Who is a Hunter working on the border and serving as something of a double agent," Allison finished with pride. "He takes a lot of risks to make sure everything gets to us. It’s not exactly a perfect system, and it’s certainly not sustainable forever, but it works for now. And we only need to hold out long enough for—”

“Alli,” Stiles said, low and full of warning.

“It’s not like it’s a secret.” Allison’s reply was immediate, like they’d had the argument before and it always went this way.

“We don’t go telling our business to random people off the street,” Stiles shot back, waving a hand in Leah’s direction without even turning around to look at her. “We don’t know if we can trust her. We don’t even know her name.”

“Just because _you_ never bothered to ask for it doesn’t mean no one else did.”

Stiles turned toward Leah then, both eyebrows raised, and she flushed.

The look on his face was so taken aback, like he hadn’t expected her to _dare_ address him directly, irked her, though, so she ignored her sweaty palms and said, “It’s Leah, by the way. And I have as much of a right to know what’s going on in this godforsaken place as anyone else, considering I live in it and therefore what happens here affects me too.”

Stiles looked her up and down with narrowed eyes and Leah concentrated very hard on keeping her head held high, and also on not tripping over anything and making a damn fool out of herself. After a moment, he licked his lips and faced front again.

“You’ve got guts, kid. I’ll give you that.”

“I’m not a kid,” Leah snapped. “I’m twenty-two.”

Stiles snorted.

“Congrats, kid,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his tone. “Clearly, you know everything.”

“At least _I_ know enough not to go traipsing through downtown practically alone like a suicidal nutjob!”

Stiles’ amusement, such as it was, drained away in an instant.

“It’s the fastest way to get where we’re going,” he said in a tone that dared her to contradict him.

“And the most dangerous,” Leah said anyway, because she wanted to live and this was not the best way to go about it.

They had started passing scent markers a few blocks back, few and far between but all the more prominent for it, each one a neon sign declaring who was in charge here. With how muddied and inconsistent the scents were, covered up and layered over each other, it was obvious that the territory was disputed, and disputed territory meant fighting. Lots and lots of fighting, as evidenced by the reddish stains on every street corner, splashed across the light cement and still reeking of copper-sharp and bile. It was true that werewolves weren’t early risers just as a general rule, but the sun was more than halfway to its zenith and it was a only a matter of time before someone came to run them off and that was guaranteed not to go well.

“Derek’s in far more danger than we are,” Stiles growled. “He’s weak and vulnerable and alone, and I’m not leaving him out there for an extra three hours so that we can take the scenic route.”

Leah opened her mouth to let him hear what a _real_ growl sounded like, but Allison put a hand on her shoulder to pull her back.

“Derek is going to be okay,” she said soothingly. “He’s been through a lot of shit in his life, Stiles, and he’s always come out the other side of it. You know better than anyone how strong he is.”

“Not right now, he’s not,” Stiles argued with a stubborn shake of his head. “We have to find him, Alli, before something else happens to him. I’m not gonna lose him again. I can’t.”

“You’re not the only one who lost him, Stiles,” Allison reminded him, her voice staying soft but her grip on Leah’s shoulder tightening. “We both lost someone that day. Two someones, actually.”

“And that’s why we have to get this done as quickly as possible!” Stiles said. “Because it’s not just Derek depending on us, but Scott too. Unless I’m interpreting that message entirely wrong, Derek is out here but Scott is still wherever they’ve been this whole time. Which means we need to get him the hell out, ASAP.”

“And we will,” Allison said, sure and determined and a blessed voice of reason. “But we can’t help either of them if we run headfirst into this and get ourselves killed because we were stupid and reckless. They need us at our best, Stiles, not our most emotionally compromised.”

Stiles might have grumbled something under his breath and usually Leah would have heard it, but another sound caught her ear. Voices, several of them echoing off of brick walls, far away right now but approaching much faster than she was comfortable with.

Leah reached out blindly to tap at Allison’s side, unwilling to draw her eyes away from the direction of the danger long enough to look back at her.

“Uh, guys? We’re gonna have visitors pretty soon.”

Immediately, both her companions straightened up, alert and cautious, their argument entirely forgotten. They followed her eyeline to the nearest bystreet. To Leah’s sensitive nose, there were at least three distinct scents smeared across the crooked street sign on that corner: three alphas with a recent claim. Judging by how strong the newest scent was, that alpha had probably only taken control a day or two ago. Very not good; new alphas were always especially eager to prove themselves in the most bloody and forceful way possible.

Leah didn’t hesitate to fall back when Stiles stepped in front of her, reaching into his backpack to pull out what looked like some kind of baton. Then there was a click and it was sliding out into a full length staff, the dinged up metal glinting dully in the late morning light. He shrugged out of his pack and handed it off to Allison, who shouldered it without comment.

“Alli, take a bird’s eye view,” Stiles said quietly. “Overwatch.”

With barely a rustle of fabric, Allison’s hood was on and she was halfway up the nearest building. Within seconds she had taken up a position on the edge of the roof, hunkered low with her bow in hand, an arrow nocked and ready to fly.

The voices were getting closer, footsteps rising up to join them. Soon the newcomers would be near enough for Leah to count their heartbeats. Her eyes scanned her surroundings for convenient hiding spots but there were none, just more broken down or abandoned buildings, and they’d know she was there anyway.

By the time she could make out actual words amid the shouts, Leah was seriously contemplating making a run for it, but Stiles just stood there in the middle of the street, waiting. So Leah waited too, straining for the strangely muffled but completely steady beat of his heart so that she wouldn’t have to focus on how her own was pounding.

Eight heartbeats incoming from the south. Eight werewolves coming their way, whooping and showing off amongst themselves, the kind of rowdy that promised nothing good for whoever got in their way. Eight probably violent werewolves upwind and close enough for their scents to reach Leah: the new alpha, six betas, and an omega.

The alpha emerged first, eyes already glowing red. With him came his newly acquired betas, who stumbled to a halt when they finally caught on that the street wasn’t empty before fanning out to flank their alpha. The omega—a rangy, starved-looking man with a twitch and a permanent sneer on his face—fell in behind them all, hovering unacknowledged at the far back of the group.

It wasn’t a particularly impressive display, all things considered, but it was plenty intimidating to Leah when their own numbers were so paltry. Eight wolves was a relatively small pack nowadays, but even one wolf tended to outmatch a human and the lowest ranked beta wolf was almost always stronger than an omega like her.

The alpha lifted his head, making a big show out of sniffing the air.

“You’re in the wrong part of town, human,” he called out, the word “human” sounding like an insult. “This ain’t the place for you. _You,_ though.”

His red eyes fell on Leah and she was hit by the urge to turn her head, bare her neck, roll over to show him her belly and hope that appeased him. She shook off the disturbing impulse with a low growl, taking another step further behind Stiles. She found herself reaching almost unconsciously for the knife in her backpack side pocket, the one Allison had given her earlier that morning.

The alpha wasn’t the least bit put off by her lack of immediate submission, smirking at her.

“You look like you could use a pack, baby,” he said, sauntering into the wide empty space between the alley mouth and where Stiles still stood, unimpressed by the display. “Mine could use a pretty bitch like you.”

Leah growled again, louder this time. The alpha’s smirk grew, sharp and eager, but Stiles tapped the butt of his staff against the concrete.

“I don’t think so, pal,” he said calmly and with absolutely no room for dispute.

The alpha laughed, loud and overzealous like Stiles’ denial was the most ludicrous and amusing thing he had ever heard. Then he turned around to make sure that his pack were laughing too.

“Really, _pal?_ ” he said, still laughing. When he pointed a finger at Stiles, his claws were out. “You shouldn’t be here, _buddy._ You’re gonna get yourself hurt going places you shouldn’t be.”

“Last time I checked, this was a free country,” Stiles said.

“Not anymore,” the alpha told him. He held his arms out to the side, spinning around to showcase the scenery. “This here is my territory, _friend._ ”

“And all of Beacon Hills is mine.”

The alpha let out one more bark of laughter, this one pure disbelief at Stiles’ gall. He moved forward again, Leah completely forgotten in his quest to prove his dominance over the stranger on his turf. Leah didn’t understand how the guy could think himself a match for Stiles, not when Stiles hadn’t so much as twitched in the face of the current threat, and not when he stank of the ozone-sharp smell of magic.

“You better check yourself, human,” the alpha said harshly. “If you pay the toll and show me the proper respect, then maybe I can let you and your omega bitch walk on by, but you mouth off to me again and I’ll have to teach you who runs these streets.”

Stiles didn’t blink at the threat.

“You are far from the first alpha I’ve faced off with, and yet I’m the one still standing,” he said. “I’ll give you one chance to walk away. I suggest you take it.”

Leah could practically _see_ the alpha’s hackles raise, almost like a bristle of fur along his back even though he wasn’t fully shifted. The betas were shuffling on their feet and passing uncertain looks among themselves, obviously unnerved by Stiles’ lack of fear, but the alpha was too far gone in his indignation to read the warning signs.

“What’d you say to me?” he demanded, chest puffed out and head down like a bull ready to charge. “You little punk _bitch._ Who the fuck do you think you are? You come in here and—”

“Last chance.”

Stiles’ interruption was the last straw. With a roar and a jerk of his head, the alpha’s features shifted and rearranged into something inhuman, something _monstrous._ His mouth, when he let out another roar, was full of wickedly sharp fangs and the sound of his battle cry made Leah shrink back and cover her ears with a whimper.

The alpha made a grab for Stiles, claws slicing through the air, but he didn’t meet his mark. Before he could make contact, Stiles had raised his staff in a two-handed grip and was spinning to the side on nimble feet. The staff came down on the alpha’s back hard enough to make him stumble forward. By the time the alpha regained his balance, Stiles was out of range.

A snarled command from the alpha sent his betas into a frenzy, each of them leaping forward to defend their leader even though it was pretty clear that he had done nothing to earn their loyalty in his short reign. The bonds in a pack were on an instinctual level, compelling and irrational and very hard to resist. Betas were meant to protect and serve their alpha, whether they liked him or not, and theoretically the alpha would protect them in return.

A good alpha would never lead his pack into a fight like this.

Maybe it had seemed like a good idea at the start. Seven werewolves—eight if they included the tagalong omega, obviously angling for an invitation into the pack proper—against two, one of whom wasn’t even a wolf? It should have been a cake walk. But they hadn’t counted on Stiles being who he was. The Emissary would not be easily brought down, and apparently even an entire pack of werewolves was not enough.

Stiles’ staff came down again and again, every movement finding vulnerable flesh with a whistle and a heavy _thunk._ It connected with one beta’s face, sending a spray of blood and teeth into the air, and immediately the other end was being driven back into another beta’s gut. A second later, it spun around to knock the feet out from under a third beta and send him crashing into a fourth. Five wolves met and matched in the first ten seconds of the fight.

None of the betas could even get _near_ Stiles. He was slippery and smart, making sure to stay just out of his opponent’s reach except to land his blow, feinting one way before sliding the other. More than once he managed to send his attackers crashing into each other instead of him. He moved with grace and precision, ruthless in his strikes and so quick that his staff was little more than a blur as he knocked the wolves on their asses every time they came for him. One beta was already down for good, unmoving, and the rest were starting to balk.

The alpha wouldn’t have that. He roared again and charged, ducking Stiles’ first blow and swiping at his exposed stomach. Stiles jumped back but the alpha’s claws still raked across his shirt, tearing through fabric to meet skin. The scratches didn’t slow Stiles down at all. The next time the staff swung around to meet the alpha, there was a glint of metal on the end that hadn’t been there before, far shinier than the rest of it—a blade, spring-loaded like the rest of the weapon, if Leah had to guess.

The alpha screamed when the blade sunk into his side, and it _had_ to be silver to get that kind of a reaction from an alpha werewolf. Stiles yanked it free with an awful squelch and took advantage of the alpha’s moment of weakness to ram the butt of the staff into his throat. The strangled gurgling sound the wolf let out made Leah’s stomach turn over, especially in combination with the sour bile smell—so much worse than the regular stench of clean blood—that told her Stiles’ stab had nicked something really important in his abdomen.

The whiz of an arrow made Leah jump; she had forgotten about Allison, still perched on the roof above them. Obviously the pack had too, if they had ever noticed her at all. The arrow found its home in the eye of one of the betas, poised as she was behind Stiles and ready to take advantage of his preoccupation as he fought against two of her packmates. The beta slumped to the side and lay there, twitching slightly, until she stopped moving entirely. Stiles paused in his beatdown to send Allison a thumbs up.

Leah stayed where she was, as far away from the battle as she could possibly get without abandoning her traveling companions entirely. As terrifying as it was to witness one human kick the everloving _shit_ out of eight wolves simultaneously, she couldn’t help but be relieved that she wasn’t needed.

No, wait. _Seven_ wolves.

The omega wasn’t in the fray. If he had any self-preservation instinct at all, he had bolted at the first sign of a fight, but he hadn’t struck Leah as the type that would run. He’d had that hungry look about him, not so much of physical hunger but of something deeper. A thirst for power, or maybe just bloodlust. No, a feeling in her gut told her the omega would still be lurking nearby, ready to scavenge whatever he could out of the situation.

Her gut feeling was right.

The skitter of a kicked stone across pavement was the only warning she had before a clawed hand came flying toward her. She jerked out of the way with a startled cry, stumbling and nearly ending up on her ass. The omega swung again and she barely managed to duck it, sliding underneath his outstretched arm and shoving him off balance as she came up behind him.

Leah searched frantically for Stiles, but he was fully occupied with the alpha and the four betas still on their feet, far too busy to pay any mind to the stray omega and too far away to reach them in time to help anyway. Allison wasn’t an option either. Her perch was directly above where Leah and the omega were circling each other, the angle making her unable to even _see_ that Leah was in trouble, much less provide backup.

Leah was on her own in this.

Panic made her fingertips itch, claws trying to force their way through her nail beds, and she could already feel the prickle of fur struggling to sprout on the sides of her face. Animal rage pulled at her, blurred her thoughts, made her want to lash out and go for the kill with a ferocity that made her shake. She forced the shift back with a monumental effort, fumbling for her knife instead. The handle of it slipped against her sweaty palm but she gripped tight and held the measly weapon out in front of her.

The omega gave a creaky laugh and tilted his head to the side until it cracked, one way and then the other. His eyes flashed blue, bright and damning, and he sniffed the air, licking his lips like the scent of Leah’s fear was delicious. He slunk forward, slow and deliberate, eyes never leaving hers.

“Little bitch scared to use her claws?” he asked, his voice high-pitched and scratchy.

Leah swallowed hard. When the omega’s eyes flooded with electric blue again, Leah felt her own eyes flash involuntarily in response.

There was no warning this time before the omega attacked. He tensed, coiled, and leapt all in less than a second, filthy claws digging deep into her forearm when she flung it up on reflex. She threw him off as hard as she could, an unnatural strength pulsing through her, and he went flying into the wall to send chips of brick cascading onto the sidewalk. Leah skittered back and flexed her arm, feeling for the extent of the damage, but the burning heat in skin and muscle told her the wounds would be gone in a few seconds.

He came at her again, and this time Leah swung out with the knife before he could reach her. It caught him across the upper arm, but the sick resistance of it as the blade sank into his flesh had Leah yanking it away before it could do real damage and the omega laughed again. It was a manic sound, gleeful in the face of pain in a way that made her skin crawl and her heart beat in doubletime.

Twice more the omega made grabs for her, but they were half-hearted at best, almost _playful_ in their simplicity. He was just toying with her, pushing and prodding and testing her defenses, trying to goad her into letting go and really fighting him.

But Leah didn’t want to let go. She didn’t want to give in to that shivery rush of heat and let the animal take her over, make her into something she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be like the omega before her, savage and wolflike even in his human form as if he had shifted so many times that he couldn’t find his way back anymore.

Had he been like her once? Had he just woken up one morning with a bedspread ripped to shreds by claws that hadn’t been there when he had gone to sleep? Had he sliced open his lips on new teeth and tasted copper long after the cuts had disappeared? Had he spent that first full moon baying for blood and finding it in the people who tried so hard to help? Had he had a family like she’d had?

The omega’s claws found Leah’s shoulder and dug in before she could spin out of the way. The spike of pain made her blood boil, the heat of it rushing through her veins and pushing, _pushing_ at her insides until she wasn’t strong enough to resist. The snarl burst out of her before she could stop it, gums giving way to fangs as she shifted. She caught the omega’s wrist with claws of her own and twisted until it snapped with that disturbingly familiar crunching noise.

The omega yipped in pain, yanking his arm back and trying to circle around behind her. Leah didn’t give him the chance to finish his circuit. The yellow glow of the wolf overlaying her sight made everything sharper, clearer, slower almost as she moved faster than before.

Instinct told her to go for the most vulnerable spots: throat, underbelly, spine. The omega was quick to dart away from her next swipe, claws barely glancing across his side, so Leah redirected the force of the blow to bring it down on the back of his leg instead. It gave out underneath him, muscles and tendons torn apart by four deep gashes that soaked his pant leg with blood.

Her prey was down, the back of his neck bared as he struggled to make his legs support him again, and something in Leah howled for her to sink her teeth into his nape and _bite_ as hard as she could, hard enough to snap the delicate bones there and eliminate the threat. The urge drove her forward before she could think better of it. She raised a hand to strike, but a heavy impact sent her flying.

One of the betas slammed into her side, knocking the wind out of her. The beta was up again in a second, throwing himself back towards Stiles with a roar of his own. It was only he and the alpha left standing, the other betas strewn still and silent around them on the pavement, and Stiles was still fighting. There were a few more tears in his shirt, but his movements were as fluid as they had been when the fight started and the blade on his staff was dripping with red.

As she watched, he caught the rampaging beta in the chest with his shoulder and used his own momentum to flip the wolf over his shoulder. Then he spun the staff high over his head once, twice, and brought it down like a spear to stab deep into the beta’s chest. Without so much as breaking stride, Stiles wrapped both hands around the staff—apparently embedded so firmly as to be immovable, or maybe there was some kind of magic worked into the weapon itself—and used it to support his full weight as he swung around and slammed feet first into the alpha’s stomach.

Leah’s distraction cost her. The beta’s interruption had shocked her out of her fugue state, the hyper-awareness and single-minded drive of the wolf that frightened her so much, and now her mind was sluggish and fuzzy. She didn’t hear the omega’s approach until he was right behind her, lurching forward on a half-healed leg with Leah’s own discarded knife in his hand.

Again, it was instinct that drove her. With the glint of silver coming at her from one side and claws flying toward her from the other, Leah leapt straight for him, tackling the omega around the middle and taking him to the ground. Before she even realized what it would mean, she had brought her hand slashing down across the omega’s neck, splitting the delicate skin wide open with one decisive, adrenaline-fueled motion.

The body beneath her twitched, gasping for air and choking on its own lifeblood instead. And then it was still, the electric blue eyes fading back to dull grey and staring glassily up at the sunny sky above them.

Leah stayed there, crouching over the dead man, until the constant sounds of the battle behind her finally ceased and there was silence. The sticky-wet of blood between her fingers, under her human nails when the claws slid back under her skin, was hot and demanding, the brightness of the color drawing her eyes away from the dead man’s. Her ears felt like they had been stuffed with cotton, plugged up and far away, but she still heard the light tap of feet as they came up behind her.

With what seemed like a monumental effort, Leah forced her muscles to engage in the should-be simple task of lifting her off the corpse, getting her legs underneath her in a standing position, turning her head away from the sight before her.

Allison’s hand on her arm made her flinch, made her skin crawl, but she didn’t let herself pull away from the touch.

“Are you okay?” Allison asked. Her hood was off now, bow stowed on her back again, and there was a crease of concern between her eyebrows. Her fingers strayed to Leah’s forearm, the holes in her sleeve where the omega’s claws had found her, but Leah shook her off.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just a few scratches. All healed up now.”

Allison gave her a sidelong look like she didn’t quite believe that and Leah was glad that Allison wasn’t a werewolf, that she couldn’t pick up on chemosignals. Hers were probably a mess right now and no one needed to know that but her. She forced a smile on her face and hoped it was reassuring.

After another assessing moment, Allison nodded. Then she reached into a side pocket of her backpack and pulled out a red rag. It hadn’t originally been red, that much was obvious, but it was stained with what had to be layers and layers of blood, long since washed away but never fully gone from the weave. Some places were stained darker than others, long straight tracks like Allison used it to wipe down her arrows after she pulled them free of their targets.

Allison held it out to Leah now with a pointed glance down to her bloodied forearm, then at her shoulder where more tears in her shirt signaled another hidden injury. Finally her gaze lingered on Leah’s face. The rag, when Leah dragged it across her cheek, came away wet and sticky and darker than before.

She wiped down as best she could—the creases of her hands were unwilling to give up their bounty—and went to hand the rag back, wanting it as far away as possible, but she found Allison staring over her shoulder with a grim look on her face. Leah followed her line of sight to where Stiles was crouched beside one of the betas. His back was to them, but Leah thought she could guess well enough what he was doing.

“He doesn’t need to check them all,” Leah said to Allison, quiet because it was only appropriate surrounded by the hush of death. “There’s no heartbeats here but our own.”

“He knows,” Allison said just as softly. “That’s not what he’s doing.”

Leah opened her mouth to ask, but Stiles stood up and moved on to another, again crouching down at the dead beta’s side. This time she could see the way he lay a hand upon the girl’s chest like he was waiting for a breath that wouldn’t come. Then she saw the knife in his other hand.

He didn’t use it on the dead girl, thank god. It was true that Leah got a bit of a shady vibe from Stiles, but she hadn’t really thought corpse desecration was something he would get off on. Instead, he pressed it to his own forearm where the sleeve had been rolled up. There was already a smear of red on the skin there and, if she squinted, Leah could make out rows and rows of small, white scars parading up his arm and under his sleeve. Whatever the hell he was doing, he had done it many times before.

But then, maybe she had spoken too soon about the whole “not desecrating a corpse” thing.

Stiles dragged the flat of the blade through the upwelling of his blood, wetting the shiny surface, and brought it to the dead girl’s throat. He nicked the girl’s skin right at the jugular and her blood seeped out to mingle with his, slow and reluctant with no beating heart to push it on its way. All the time, he was whispering, chanting words that Leah couldn’t quite make out but was certain she wouldn’t understand anyway because this was _magic,_ it had to be.

“What is he doing?”

Her voice shook just a little. Her hands were shaking too, a fine tremor that she smothered by curling her hands into fists and shoving them into the pockets of her cargo pants. The air itself felt shivery around her, unsteady like a heatwave mirage, and it made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She couldn’t decide if the sensation felt outright sinister or if it was just strange, threatening in the way that all things beyond comprehension were.

Allison didn’t seem to feel it or, if she did, she wasn’t bothered. She just said, “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. He’ll be done soon.”

“I thought we couldn’t delay for anything.”

“He’ll only be another minute. It’s important.”

Important enough to make Stiles pause in his desperate rush for Derek had to be very important indeed.

Leah watched from a distance as Stiles visited each body splayed out across the pavement—each body that he and Allison had put there, and the one she had too—his head bowed as he muttered and cut and worked whatever spell he was working. When he was finished, he used the same blood-rag Allison had leant Leah to clean his arm and to wipe the residue from his blade. Then he sheathed the knife and took off down the street without a word of explanation, Allison falling in behind him with a smile at Leah that felt like an apology.

For all that Allison had said their plans were no secret, that assertion didn’t seem to extend to this.

 

 

* * *

 

 

No one else approached them. Sometimes Leah heard footsteps or voices in the distance, caught scents on the breeze, but it seemed that word had spread quickly about their fight and no one was eager to meet that pack’s fate. The heart of the city, nearer to where they had set up their Headquarters, was always a ghost town whereas further toward the outskirts usually saw a drastic increase in population, but the streets were as empty around them now as they had been that morning.

It was probably for the best; Leah could still feel the blood on her hands from their last encounter, no matter how much she scrubbed her palms against her pant leg.

There wasn’t much talking among them anymore either. Leah had dared to pose a question to Stiles about how he fought: namely, that he hadn’t used any magic. He was renowned for his skill with magic, known far and wide for his power, and yet he hadn’t used a single spell even when facing eight werewolves.

“It would’ve been wasteful,” Stiles had said curtly. “I’m perfectly capable of putting people down without magic. Why would I waste energy using spells for things I can do without them? Best to conserve my power for more important things.”

That had been the end of the discussion and Leah hadn’t had the wherewithal to break the heavy silence again.

Whatever Stiles had done with those bodies, it seemed to have soured his mood. Before he had been anxious, almost afraid, with a churning mixture of lesser emotions underneath that Leah hadn’t tried very hard to identify because it was none of her business. Now he smelled angry, sad, _dark_ in a way that Leah understood all too well. A special form of self-loathing, that.

And there was something else there, lingering in his scent. Something sweet but _not,_ like decay or maybe infection. It was hard to tell. Like his heartbeat, Stiles’ scent was muted and difficult to pick up, like it was days old and fading instead of right there in front of her. Leah wondered if that was how all magic users were by nature or if it was unique to Stiles, some spell he had placed on himself to avoid detection.

Whatever it was, it was unnerving and Leah hung back by Allison. Her scent was shot through with negativity too, rubbing Leah’s nerves raw, but at least all of her scent was natural.

Leah tried to keep her nose focused on other things. Just because no one seemed inclined toward attacking them again didn’t mean it was a good idea to let her guard down; that was a surefire way for someone to get themselves killed around here. They were almost out of downtown, though, which was a relief, getting closer to the edge of town where Leah had run into Derek. It was only a matter of time now before—

Leah’s head snapped to the left, nose twitching. It was that cloying-sick scent that had stuck in her nostrils for so long the day before, overlaid with a light residue of fear and pain.

“Incoming?” Allison asked, reaching back for her bow.

“No,” Leah said. “Derek.”

The reaction was instantaneous, both she and Stiles looking frantically around as if they would find him suddenly poking his head out from behind the nearest street sign and yelling “surprise!”

“It’s old,” Leah told them hastily, before they started searching the block. “From yesterday, probably. But he was definitely here for a while.”

“Can you track him from here?” Stiles asked.

Leah nodded. She kept to herself that she would really rather not spend hours huffing that scent; Derek definitely needed help and, no matter how unpleasant the scent was, Leah was not so selfish as to ignore that for her own comfort. And she had promised Allison that she would help get her friend back. And Stiles might smite her on the spot if she refused. But mostly it was the compassion thing, the same compassion that had led her to approach Derek in the first place and gotten her into all this.

Leah took the lead with the others right on her heel. She followed the scent through the streets, down alleys, behind buildings and sometimes through the buildings themselves. The path stayed well away from any heavily populated areas, hugging the shadows where it could, and in some spots it lingered stronger than others, like he had stopped to rest there or hide from passersby.

She followed the path past the marketplace, giving that a very wide berth, and through an abandoned suburb, cutting through overgrown lawns and knocked-down picket fences to reach the edge of the woods. She would admit to hesitating there, if only because she had found the woods creepy even before she knew there could be literal werewolves in there. Of course, now she _was_ one of the literal werewolves, so she didn’t really have any excuse anymore.

She took a deep breath, readying herself to blaze a trail, but she didn’t have to. Stiles overtook her before she could take the first step, striding forward into the trees without hesitation. Allison had said the day before that he thought he knew where else Derek might have gone, if he didn’t stay where Leah had left him; apparently he had been right. Stiles led them right along Derek’s trail even without scent to guide his way, only glancing at Leah occasionally to make sure Derek hadn’t deviated, and eventually they came out in a clearing.

At first Leah thought it was empty, but then she caught sight of what looked like the remnants of an old house. A few structural beams were still standing tall, one corner of the bottom floor almost intact, but the rest of it was charred and rotted wood collapsed in on itself and battered by the elements. It didn’t look like a safe place for _anyone_ to be, much less a possibly sick or injured, newly made human, but there was definitely a heartbeat somewhere in the ruin.

Leah helpfully pointed in its direction. Without wasting a moment, Stiles clambered over the remains of a front porch toward the one intact corner, crunching through the detritus and paying no heed to the possible splinters. The heartbeat stuttered and doubled its pace, picking up even more speed as Stiles’ footsteps came closer.

The girls followed him through the wreckage, adding their own crunching noises to the din. Leah wasn’t near enough to catch new chemosignals as they converged on the heartbeat’s location but she was almost certain that, if she had been, she would be smelling fear. She opened her mouth to call out—whether to warn Stiles of potential danger, or to alert the heartbeat that they were friendlies and not enemies, she hadn’t decided—but either way, she was too late.

The wooden plank narrowly missed Stiles’ head, and only then because Stiles ducked out of the way. He followed the reflex through to its natural counterattack, a grab and twist using his opponent’s force against them, and had his attacker pinned against his chest with a silver dagger at his throat in a fraction of a second. The man fought hard, pulling at Stiles’ arm around his chest with all the strength he could muster, but Stiles was stronger.

It wasn’t until Allison called his name that Derek ceased his struggles. He staggered forward when Stiles released his hold, almost overbalancing in his haste to turn around. He froze.

Derek wasn’t in very good condition. He had the look of someone who had once been heavily muscled but had fallen out of shape. An old leather jacket, more holes than anything else, hung off his frame and made him look even smaller than he probably was. What they could see of his skin past a layer of dirt and a thick coating of facial hair was greyish, almost waxy in the failing light of early evening, and his dark hair was lank and falling in his eyes—wide, pale eyes, shocked and staring at Stiles like he was the eighth wonder of the world.

Stiles stared back, every bit of his imposing aura gone even with the knife still in his hand. In that moment, with his face slack in relief and something like awe, Leah thought maybe she could see a bit of that sweet teenager Allison had described to her. More so when Stiles let the knife slip from his fingers to clatter across what was left of the wooden floor.

“Derek?”

A slow smile spread across Derek’s lips and it changed his whole face, erasing the haunted, hunted look and replacing it with such an intense relief and happiness that Leah could smell it from halfway across the ruined house.

Tossing the plank aside, Derek flung himself at Stiles, engulfing him in a hug so aggressive it nearly knocked them both to the floor. Stiles hugged him back just as tightly and buried his face in Derek’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Derek said, voice muffled in Stiles’ hair. “I didn’t—I couldn’t smell you, I didn’t know—I panicked.”

“A piece of wood, though?” Stiles said with a watery chuckle, like he was struggling not to cry. “Really? That’s the best you got?”

Derek laughed too and tightened his grip, apparently content to just stand there and hold Stiles in his arms for as long as possible.

It was honestly a beautiful, touching moment, and Leah fervently wished that she was literally anywhere else but here. Beautiful as the moment was—totally worthy of a slow motion montage on the big screen, complete with sweeping orchestral music and a rapt, tearful audience—it was also intensely _private._ Allison, at least, was close to both of them and had been for years, but Leah had absolutely no part in this. She shouldn’t be here, bearing witness to this.

And the smell, Jesus. The scents of relief and joy were strong enough to make her lightheaded, and they _hurt._ They hurt because it had been years since Leah had felt them herself and this echo of it, the sympathetic chemical reaction her brain produced, was a cruel reminder of what real happiness had felt like.

Leah wrapped her arms around her own waist and looked away, staring out into the forest and trying her damnedest to ignore all the sniffling behind her.

Her attention was drawn back by a yelp. She turned to see Derek rubbing at a spot on his side with an affronted look on his face—Stiles had probably pinched him, he seemed like a pincher—and Stiles frowning hard.

“Why in god’s name would you come back here?” Stiles demanded. “Of all places, really?”

“It’s home,” Derek said. “Where else would I go?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Der. Maybe somewhere with four standing walls? A roof, perhaps?” Stiles said with an exaggerated roll of his eyes and an expansive gesture of his hand. “It gets cold out here at night, Derek, and you may not realize but humans don’t stand up to extreme temperatures as well as werewolves do. You could have frozen to death! You could get sick!”

Derek tried to interject but it seemed like Stiles was working himself up for a proper rant, one fueled by pent up worry and frustration. He probably would have been pacing if the floor weren’t so unstable. Funny, but Leah hadn’t pegged him as the mother hen type and apparently she had been wrong.

“You could’ve gotten hurt!” he said. “There’s no cover here, Derek, nowhere for you to hide in case of an attack! What if we hadn’t been the ones to find you out here?” Stiles asked, almost accusatory. “You could be dead right now, for real! What if Leah hadn’t gotten the message to us at all, or we hadn’t believed her? What if—”

“Stiles!”

Derek caught Stiles’ hand halfway through another wild gesticulation, wrapping it in both of his own and holding it against his chest.

“I knew you would find me here,” he said, low and certain. “You’ve done it before, a dozen times. You always find me, Stiles.”

Derek’s heartbeat was steady and truthful. Stiles’ pulse, on the other hand, skipped a beat and his scent went flat and thin. Leah almost didn’t recognize it for what it was—she had never smelled it on anyone but herself, and no one could really smell their own chemosignals the same way they did others’—but it made her stomach churn and her face heat up, and she certainly recognized that feeling in herself: guilt.

Stiles smiled, though. It wasn’t anywhere near the blinding grin that had graced his face a few moments ago, but it was convincing enough for someone who couldn’t smell or hear that it was a lie. For someone human.

Stiles smiled and patted Derek’s hands with his free one, nodding. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strained in its attempt to sound jovial.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course, big guy. Always.”

Then Stiles pulled his hands out of Derek’s grip and took a step back, thumbing over his shoulder.

“I should, uh… Well, it’s too late to head back into town now,” he said brightly. “We’ll set up camp here tonight. I just need to...do a perimeter run, set up a few wards. Precautionary, really, just better safe than sorry.”

His heartbeat skipped. And not the uncomfortable, guilt-laden heart-clench of a moment ago but an actual, I-am-definitely-lying _skip._ And of course it was a lie. The woods were empty for as far as Leah could hear and farther, no threats around for miles—no other living creatures at _all_ that she could hear—and she was willing to bet that Stiles knew that as well as she did. There was no need for a warded perimeter, and if there was no need then Stiles wasn’t going to set it up. He would conserve his energy for more important things, like he had told her earlier, instead of wasting it on unnecessary spells.

Which meant that, really, all he was doing was running away from Derek.

Leah wondered if Derek knew that, if he knew Stiles well enough to see through the fake smile and the excuse. If he did, he took it in stride, because after a long moment of watching Stiles disappear into the treeline, he turned around with a smile on his face and held his arms out to Allison.

Allison had clearly been holding herself back for the sake of Derek and Stiles’ emotional reunion. Now she practically took a flying leap at the man with a squeal. The impact nearly knocked him over, but he laughed and hugged her nearly as tightly as he had Stiles. When they let go of each other, Derek kept his hands on Allison’s shoulders, looking her up and down.

“Hey, Eagle-Eye,” he said.

“Sourwolf,” Allison responded teasingly. She was still smiling, still radiating happiness, but there were tears on her cheeks that she didn’t bother to wipe away when she said, “It’s really good to see you again, Derek. I didn’t think we’d get to.”

“Neither did I.”

Leah was contemplating fleeing into the woods after Stiles, maybe offering to take over the imaginary patrol he had going on, but that plan was derailed by Derek setting his sights on _her_ next. Possibly the very last thing she had expected was for Derek to approach her with a smile just as big as those he’d had for his friends and wrap his arms around her too.

“Thank you,” he whispered, his beard rasping against her temple. “Thank you for bringing them back to me.”

It might not have been _the_ most awkward moment of Leah’s entire life, but it certainly made the list. And yet...it was also sort of nice. For all that he was thinner than he should be, Derek was still tall and broad and warm. Some part of Leah wanted to forget that this was a stranger, a man she had exchanged maybe ten minutes’ worth of conversation with over two days, and just sink into the embrace. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been hugged.

That wasn’t true. She knew exactly when her last hug was: six years ago, eight days after the first wave of the supernatural proliferation and four days before her first full moon. Her mother had hugged her, held her tight like this, and told her that it was going to be okay. It had been a lie, but Leah hadn’t yet learned what an unsteady heartbeat meant so it had been a comfort anyway.

And somehow, this was a comfort too. She had barely touched another person in years and the heat of Derek’s hand on her back was almost better than the lukewarm shower she had reveled in back at Headquarters. Up this close, she could smell beyond the sick-magic scent to _Derek,_ earthy and solid and like still waters in winter. It was a nice smell, much more soothing than Stiles’ smoke and cinnamon and lightning, or Allison’s metal shavings and lilac. So she let Derek hug her for as long as he wanted to.

When he pulled back, he thanked her again with so much sincerity it almost hurt to hear it.

“Glad I could help,” she told him, and nothing had ever been truer.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Allison set up a campfire on the open expanse of grass in front of the ruin, she and Derek gathering up sticks and branches from the woods surrounding the clearing for a stack large enough to burn through the night. Leah didn’t see why they couldn’t just scavenge perfectly good wood from the ruin of the house, but they stayed well clear of it by some silent mutual agreement and she figured it wasn’t her place to disagree. After all, she was the outsider here.

Should she leave? After all, she had fulfilled her promise to Derek and gotten his message to the Emissary in a timely manner. She had fulfilled her promise to Allison and led them back to their friend. She hadn’t made any other promises, had no other obligations to these people and no more reason to stay with them.

Only they didn’t seem eager to see her leave. Stiles was still pacing around in the woods—not casting any sort of spells, from what Leah could hear, but just crunching back and forth through the underbrush and occasionally throwing rocks—so maybe he would kick her to the curb once he made his reappearance, but Allison still smiled at her and Derek kept looking over every minute or two like he was checking to make sure she was still there.

Leah lingered on the outskirts of their little makeshift camp, holding tight to her backpack and shifting on her feet.

She could just go, whether they forced her out or not. That would probably be the wisest thing for her to do; she didn’t _know_ these people and had no real reason to trust them, to stick around and potentially put her life in their hands. But they hadn’t stabbed her in the back so far, and she was reasonably sure that they wouldn’t. That was more than she could say for anyone else.

Leah could leave and go back to running the streets, running from town to town, always running away from something or other and never slowing down. Or she could stay here and eat canned orange slices and talk to people who weren’t currently trying to kill her. She could learn more about them, maybe actually get to _know_ them. If she was very lucky, she might even get to have friends again for a while. With the next full moon two weeks away, she didn’t know if she should hope for that or fear it.

When Allison had gotten the kindling to light with a preciously rare match, she sat down cross-legged before the growing fire and waved for Leah to join them.

She did so slowly, lowering herself to sit beside Allison at her urging. Allison had let her hair down again and it kept falling in her face. It made her look so much younger, softened the harsh cut of her jaw and left shadows across her eyes. The firelight did her good. Derek, too, though it threw the hollows of his cheeks into sharp relief. The yellow glow at least gave his skin a warmer hue and made him look a little bit healthier.

“You don’t need to look so skittish,” Derek said to her. “We don’t bite.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Sourwolf,” Allison interjected. “I seem to remember you biting a few times back in the day.”

Derek snorted.

“And we all know how well _that_ turned out.”

“That’s a codename, right?” Leah asked, because she was nosy and couldn’t stop herself. “Not just a nickname? Like Eagle-Eye and Honest Man?”

“Sourwolf was nickname first, actually,” Derek said with a half-smile, something fond and nostalgic. “Sort of an inside joke.”

“I told you that we were just a normal pack when all this started,” Allison said. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, which made her shrug a little awkward. “We just happened to end up on the front line. When you start fighting, you make enemies. And when you have enemies, you have to be careful.”

“The codenames were Stiles’ idea, to protect our identities as ‘freedom fighters’ and make it harder for someone to target our loved ones who weren’t in the pack. I think he meant them as a joke at first,” Derek with a chuckle. “Me as Sourwolf, him as _Yoda,_ if you can believe that. Then everybody in the pack insisted on having one of their own and they just stuck.”

“They were so silly.” Allison shook her head, smiling anyway. “But we all needed a little silliness back then.”

“So what about Scott’s?” Leah asked. “The Honest Man? Derek’s was from an inside joke, yours is obvious. How did Scott get his? Was he just a very trustworthy, straight-forward person?”

“Not exactly.”

 _Jesus,_ did Stiles deliberately make a habit out of inserting himself into conversations without bothering to announce his presence? Did he get off on it? Was that the _real_ reason his heartbeat and scent were so muted, so he could sneak up on werewolves and scare the shit out of them? Because he certainly did it often enough for that to be a viable theory.

He appeared at the edge of their circle of firelight, footsteps silent on the grass like they hadn’t been in the forest and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He seemed calmer now, at least, like he had worked off some of his distress and gotten a hold of himself again.

Where the campfire’s glow softened Allison and gave Derek back some of his health, it only served to harden Stiles. The shadows that leapt across his face made him look harsh, his eyes sunken in darkness but for when they caught the light, flashing gold and red every time the fire spat sparks into the night sky. Leah couldn’t help the shiver that chased down her spine as those eyes focused on her.

“Scott’s codename,” he said, like he knew somehow that she had entirely lost track of the conversation. “That one’s just a bit of wordplay.”

Leah swallowed and managed to ask, “How so?”

Stiles slid smoothly down to sit beside Derek on the other side of the fire. Derek leaned into the proximity, pressing his shoulder to Stiles’, but Stiles leaned forward—away from Derek’s touch—to poke a stick into the flames, urging them to burn brighter. Leah tried not to notice how Derek’s smile faltered, or how he shifted to the side to put more space between them instead.

“You see, Scott,” Stiles said, “is what they call a True Alpha.”

Leah fought not to look as shocked as she was; she had thought those were a legend, a myth, not a thing that actually existed. The only alphas she had ever encountered had gotten their power through violence, and none of them had deserved the status, much less earned it through their own merit.

“Whether or not he was actually totally honest,” Stiles said, “Scotty’s true as they come, as far as his alpha-ness is concerned. And since people who speak truths are by definition honest, that seemed as good a name as any to be known by. Vague but dignified, just the right combination to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies but inspire those who are loyal to you.”

“You mean, like the Emissary?”

Stiles went still at Derek’s soft words. He carefully laid down his makeshift poker and wiped his palms on his pants.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’ve certainly made a name for yourself with that,” Derek said, watching him closely. “You were our emissary, sure, but now you’re _The_ Emissary. Everyone I talked to in the last few days knew that name.”

Leah heard what Derek wasn’t saying: that everyone knew the name, and they _feared_ it. The Emissary was their protector, the one who defied the dreaded Warlock and kept them all safe, but that kind of power was intimidating no matter what it was used for. The rumors surrounding the Emissary, the ones that Leah and everyone else Derek had spoken with had heard passed around time and time again, made him sound _awesome_ in the traditional sense of the word: something worthy of awe and reverence and, yes, fear.

Doubtlessly, Stiles heard the unasked question as well. But he ignored it.

“Yeah, well, I couldn’t exactly keep on calling myself Yoda, now could I?” Stiles asked, eyes still on the flickering flames like they might go out if he didn’t keep watch on them. “I’d never have gotten anyone to respect me like that. Seemed like a good idea to trade up, after everything.”

“Everything.”

Not quite a question, but somehow more than a simple statement.

Stiles looked up at Derek now. At the new angle, the firelight spilling across his cheeks caught on the scars that dragged down his face. The white lines seemed to shine, looking almost delicate in their thinness, graceful in spite of the violence that must have put them there.

Derek was looking at them too, frowning like he hadn’t noticed them earlier. And maybe he really hadn’t; they weren’t obvious like the thicker one on the side of Stiles’ neck, and they would’ve been even harder to see in the dim light of evening. Especially with weak, human senses when he was used to the crisp night vision of werewolf eyes.

Slowly, carefully, Derek reached up a hand like he meant to touch them, to trace them with his fingers until he knew them as well as Stiles did.

“What happened to you?” he asked, voice hushed.

Stiles turned his head. He sat up straight with a cough and the heavy moment was abruptly gone.

“I’m much more concerned with what happened to _you,_ ” he said, all business. “Clearly it’s not what we assumed.”

Derek let his hand fall limply to his side, let Stiles pull away from him again. He scratched at his beard and sighed, looking twice as tired as he had a few seconds ago.

“You were at least half right,” he told them. “The Warlock got the jump on us.”

“How, though?” Allison asked. “You and Scott were a pretty formidable team. It’s not like he could just walk up, whack you both in the head, and drag you away.”

“No, but he could hit us both with a cloud of powdered wolfsbane and manage it pretty well. Wolfsbane that was made even more potent by magic, judging by the smell of it.”

“That’s how he got you, but how did he _keep_ you this long? And to what end?” Stiles asked. “I mean, _god,_ Derek, it’s been almost four years.”

Derek’s eyes widened, his heartbeat spiking.

“Four years?” he repeated, disbelieving.

Stiles and Allison exchanged uneasy looks, and Leah didn’t blame them. Derek’s scent was growing more anxious by the second and she had the sudden urge to hug him again, as if that might help.

“You didn’t know that?” Leah asked, and Derek shook his head.

“I don’t remember a whole lot,” he admitted helplessly. “Everything’s...fuzzy. Indistinct.” He shook his head again, harder, like he was still trying to shake off the remnants of that feeling. “There was some kind of spell on the room where we were kept. We were conscious but not in control of ourselves, not really. Everything was distant and...and _slow,_ and I couldn’t make thought translate into action. There wasn’t really any sense of time passing, obviously.”

“You said ‘we,’” Stiles pointed out. “How many people were in there with you?”

“Just a few. Maybe five or six others at any given time, besides Scott. All of them as magically drugged up as I was.”

“Why?” Leah asked. “I thought the Warlock killed people. That’s what everyone says, at least, that if you get snatched by the Warlock you’re a goner. No one knows who he is, though, or what he actually does with the people he takes.”

“Oh, we know who he is,” Stiles said. “We’ve known almost since the beginning.”

Leah stared around at them, taking in their grim faces, and said, “Feel free to share with the class.”

Stiles laughed at that and took up his fire-poking stick again, sending a cascade of sparks spiraling upward.

“It’s a long story,” he said. “You sure you want to hear it?”

Leah didn’t deign to answer that stupid question. She just raised an expectant eyebrow at him, which he mirrored with a sort of dark amusement.

“A long, long time ago—eight years, to be exact—we were a pack like any other,” Stiles said with the air of telling a fairytale. “Just a bunch of misfits trying to make ourselves fit better, trying to make it through high school alive. You know, the usual. And in the course of our day to day shenanigans, we faced off with an alpha named Deucalion.”

He paused like he thought maybe Leah would recognize the name. She had never heard it before. A name like that, she was pretty sure she would have remembered it. It just had a menacing sound to it all on its own. She shook her head and gestured for him to continue.

“Deucalion thought he was hot shit,” Stiles went on obligingly. “Called himself the Demon Wolf, the Alpha of Alphas, because he had learned how to steal power from other werewolves to make himself more powerful. Of course, he did this mostly by killing his own betas, which sort of makes him a _terrible_ apha by the traditional standards, but he didn’t care about pack in the least.”

“He came after us,” Derek said. “Tried to get us to kill our own, join his pack. It was a giant mess, honestly, but we came out on top eventually.”

“By which he means that he and Scott made the executive decision to let Deucalion go with a slap on the wrist and a ‘don’t do it again,’” Stiles said flatly.

“Why didn’t you kill him?” Leah asked, bewildered. As much as she hated violence in general, there were certainly some moments where it seemed warranted. Like with a crazy homicidal alpha werewolf.

“Because we were young and naive and idealistic. Because we still thought things would turn out for the best in the end,” Stiles said, a wry smile on his lips. “More the fools were we.”

“What happened to him?” Leah asked. “Is he the Warlock now?”

Stiles shook his head.

“We didn’t hear anything from Deucalion for a while,” Allison said. “We went back to school, added new packmates, faced other threats. We hardly gave him another thought.”

“Until he showed up two years after we turned him loose with a partner,” Derek said. “A former Druid named—”

“Kenneth Downes,” Stiles cut in. “Later known as the Warlock.”

It seemed like such an innocuous name, Kenneth Downes, not half as menacing as Deucalion. Not at all a suitable name for a man who would devastate the country and send shock waves around the entire world, murdering people in droves and destroying hundreds of thousands more lives in the process.

“Kenneth wanted power,” Derek said, “as all former Druids seem to. And Deucalion already knew how to get it. But apparently they weren’t satisfied with draining however many people they could get their hands on as they were, so they joined forces to take on the Nemeton.”

“What’s the Nemeton?”

“It’s an evil magic tree hiding out somewhere in these woods,” Stiles said with a wave of his hand. “Okay, more like an amoral magic tree. Ley lines, connection to the land, gateway to the other realms or whatever. It’s really not relevant anymore considering Downes blew it up.”

_“Blew it up?”_

“That wasn’t the plan,” Allison said quickly. “Well, we’re pretty sure that wasn’t the plan. As far as we can tell, they meant to use the Nemeton to boost their own power in some way. Nemetons, after all, are intensely magical places, but they also sort of have a mind of their own. They’re not easy to manipulate or use for your own ends.”

“Which Deucalion found out to his detriment,” Stiles said and this time he actually sounded a bit pleased. “He was killed when the Nemeton exploded. Kaboom.”

He made an explosion gesture with his hands, smirking around the sound effect. Leah wasn’t sure how she felt about him being so cavalier about a man’s death by explosion, but she had watched him fight and kill half a dozen people just that morning without batting an eye so at least she couldn’t say that she was surprised by it.

“Downes, unfortunately, was not,” Derek picked up the story. He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face with annoyance like he wasn’t used to it being so long. “He didn’t give a damn about Deucalion’s death,” he said, “just that their plan had gone sideways. But he’s nothing if not a resourceful son of a bitch—”

“You can say that again,” Allison muttered behind the curtain of her hair, twirling a strand around her finger.

“—and he will always be the first to take advantage of an unforeseen situation.”

“You see, the Nemeton explosion had a particular side effect that no one could have anticipated,” Stiles went on. “The explosion sent a tidal wave of magic across the land, like blowing the pressure valve off a boiler, and all that loose magic had to find a home somewhere. So it took up residence in people.”

“People like me,” Leah said hoarsely, a coldness settling in her stomach. “That’s what set off the proliferation.”

“Bingo.” Stiles winked at her. “Wild magic manifests in strange ways, and in this case it manifested in whatever way its human host was best suited for, be it werewolf or banshee or kanima or wendigo. Didn’t matter how these breeds are usually created or that it’s usually transmitted from one person to another by whatever mechanism. They just started popping up out of nowhere all over the place, as far as the Nemeton’s influence could spread. And suddenly Downes’ victim pool increased exponentially.”

“So he’s back to doing what he and Deucalion were doing to start with,” Leah guessed. “Sucking the power out of people, just a lot more of them now. How does that even work, anyway? Is it magic that he’s getting out of these people?”

“Sort of, but not really,” Stiles said, as though that were an actual answer to her question. Allison flicked a twig at his face, which he batted out of the air before it could connect, and he rolled his eyes.

“It’s...soul energy, I guess you could call it,” he said. “Every living thing has a reservoir of energy inside it that lets it be alive. Some people have more than others; supernatural creatures, for example, have far more energy in them than humans do, but there’s wide variation amongst individuals in a group too. A few people have the ability—not correlated in any quantifiable way to the strength of their soul energy, mind you—to manipulate that energy to cause an effect on the outside world. That is when we call it magic.”

“Downes is literally stealing people’s souls?”

Leah didn’t think she could be blamed for sounding a little bit panicked by that. Soul-stealing was an alarming prospect and she thought any reasonable person _should_ be panicked by it, especially when that person was among the potential victims. She had never put much stock in the concept of souls before, but if she had one then she certainly didn’t want to lose it.

“That’s a simplistic way of putting it,” Stiles said dryly, “but I supposed not entirely inaccurate. You see, magic is the manipulation of one’s own energy. Downes has that ability and so do I. It’s a perfectly normal thing for some people to be able to do, but that’s not what he’s doing here. He’s manipulating _other people’s_ energy by force. He’s siphoning off the lifeforce of unwilling victims and taking it into himself.”

“It’s incredibly dark magic,” Allison said, hugging her knees tighter to her chest. “Twisted and unnatural. The kind of thing that destroys you from the inside out.”

“And up until now, we were under the impression that this process was always a lethal one.” Stiles turned his attention back to Derek, eyes flashing in the firelight. “We thought the power draw was quick and fatal. But he had you for four years, Derek, and you turn up as a human? How is that even possible?”

Derek scratched at his beard again, brow furrowed.

“I think for most people it _is_ that way,” he said. “One spell is enough to drain them dry, and the empty shell gets tossed out with the trash. But, like you said, some people are naturally stronger than others. I think we were the strong ones.”

“The ones in the warded room?” Allison asked. “You said there were a few of you in there for a long time.”

Derek nodded.

“He would send people to pull us out sometimes, when he didn’t have any new abductees to drain,” he said. “He would have us dragged in front of him so he could perform another draw, and then put us back again. Like some kind of rechargeable battery, only we got weaker and weaker with every draw. When one of us inevitably ran out of energy for him to feed off of, he did away with what was left.”

“And you had the sheer _luck,_ ” Stiles said, halfway between disbelieving and wonderstruck, “to end up with just enough energy left to survive but not enough that he would keep you around for another go.”

“Right. Luck of the draw.” Derek let out a huff of completely unamused laughter at his own pun, his scent reeking of the bitterness and impotent anger. “It took him four years, but he finally sucked out all of the spark that made me what I was. He didn’t seem to think that would regenerate, and he doesn’t bother feeding off of humans so he tossed me out. I don’t know if he thought I wouldn’t survive long without it or if he just didn’t see me as enough of a threat to be worth killing.”

“But you did survive,” Allison said bracingly. “And if the Warlock doesn’t think that whatever information you can give us now is a threat to him, then he’s dead wrong.”

“Scott,” Stiles said. “You said Scott is still back there.”

“Still there and still Downes' favorite,” Derek told them.

“His favorite?” Leah asked.

“He’s a True Alpha,” Derek said. “He’s—”

“An incredible source of power,” Stiles finished for him. “His alpha spark was entirely inborn and strong enough to overcome the normal limitations of his breed. If the Warlock is just skimming off the top and then letting that spark restore itself over and over again, then he’s got—”

“Scary amounts of power,” Derek confirmed, fingers curling into the fabric of his pant legs tight enough that Leah was willing to bet he’d have popped claws by now if he still had the ability. “Which is why we need to get Scott out _now,_ before the Warlock can use him to reach his goal.”

“You know what his endgame is?” Allison let her legs fall out of her hold, crossing them and leaning forward intently. “That’s one thing we’ve never managed to figure out. For all that he’s spent years amassing power, he never seems to do anything with it but seek more. What does he want?”

“Transcendence.”

Leah was slapped in the face by the acrid-slimy scent of Stiles’ fear, distressingly strong even from all the way across the fire. It made Leah’s heart speed up, the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, gooseflesh chase its way down her arms, and that was just the physical reaction to those chemosignals. The feeling was made infinitely worse because it was _Stiles,_ the most powerful and dangerous person she had ever had the mixed blessing of encountering, who was emitting them. What the hell could scare someone like the Emissary this much?

“What is that?” she asked, eyes darting from one stricken face to another and back again. “Obviously it’s very, very bad, but what does it mean?”

“It means,” Stiles said, his voice slow and unsteady, “that, if the Warlock can consume enough stolen energy, he may be able to transcend mortality itself. Become something...else, something stronger.”

“He’s after immortality,” Allison breathed out, eyes wide and horrified.

“And he’s getting close,” Derek warned them. “He used to draw sparingly from Scott, only when he needed a boost for something specific, but he was using him more and more lately.”

“He’s been pushing at the border of the city,” Stiles admitted. “Making inroads into my territory, testing my defenses, looking for weak spots.”

“We thought maybe he was looking to get back to the Nemeton,” Allison said, “or at least where it used to be. It’s still a magical hotspot, even if the tree itself isn’t there anymore. If he could tap into that power like he didn’t manage to the last time, he would have enough to transcend, wouldn’t he?”

“Who knows what he could achieve then,” Derek said with a shudder.

Leah shuddered too. A power-hungry, psychopathic magician bent on sucking the souls out of innocent people was bad enough, but an _immortal_ power-hungry, psychopathic, soul-sucking magician? It really couldn’t get a whole lot worse than that.

“So we stop him before he gets that far.”

She looked up to find Stiles standing, head down and hands clenched into fists at his sides. The firelight cast his face in shadow, shrouding his expression, but the tension in his shoulders was easy to see.

“We rescue Scott,” he said bluntly. “We rob the Warlock of the personal generator he’s made out of my best friend and cut him off at the knees before he can get any closer to achieving his goal.”

“How are you going to get him out, though?” Leah asked, too concerned by the vagueness of that plan to be intimidated into silence. “And what will you do about the Warlock after? He’ll just find more people to draw from, won’t he?”

“We’ll figure all that out later,” Stiles said firmly. “We always manage to figure these things out.”

He was lying. His heartbeat skipped, but Leah was the only one of them to hear it and she couldn’t bring herself to call him out when Derek was looking up at him with wide, trusting eyes like he truly expected Stiles to succeed. He had far more faith in Stiles than Stiles had in himself, that much was clear.

Stiles stepped back out of the circle of firelight, the darkness of night creeping in to wrap around him like a cloak.

“I’ll take first watch,” he said. “I’m gonna run the perimeter again, make sure everything is secure.”

He turned and disappeared into the woods again without a backward glance, leaving them all to stare after him.

Allison cleared her throat into the silence. She pushed herself to her feet and swept her hair back from her face, tying it up in a bun with a few swift movements.

“I’m gonna go with him,” she said with a not entirely convincing smile. “No one should be alone in the preserve at night these days. Wouldn’t want him getting lost, would we?”

She dropped a kiss on the top of Derek’s head and said, “Eat something and get some sleep. Both of you.”

Then she was gone too, a cloud of anxiety trailing in her wake.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The ground was chilly, the grass slightly damp, and there was a smattering of inescapable twigs that had a talent for finding vulnerable spots to poke into, but it was by far _not_ the most inhospitable place that Leah had ever slept. In fact, with a fire crackling beside her and three reasonably trustworthy heartbeats within earshot, it was miles above what she was used to. The low hum and buzz of the forest around her was reassuring, all the prey animals out there at ease and accepting of their presence like they knew no harm would come to them because of these intruders.

The only unease right now was Derek’s.

He had been fine for a while after Allison had followed Stiles off on their “patrol,” far more comfortable around Leah than she thought he should be when his friends were out of range. She could have torn him apart like wet tissue paper long before the others could have come to his rescue, if she had been so inclined, but he seemed to have accepted her as an ally as soon as she kept her word about delivering his message.

He had readily taken the turkey jerky and bread that Leah pulled out of her backpack and eaten like he hadn’t in days, which was a distinct possibility considering the circumstances. He’d had some trouble getting the can of orange slices open with a knife—probably because he had always had claws for such purposes before, no tricky knife-work needed—but the stubborn clench of his jaw as he worked at it had warned her against offering to help.

Stiles and Allison still hadn’t been back by the time they had finished their meager meal. The two of them had lingered out in the woods, far enough away that their voices hadn’t carried all the way back to the camp but not so far that Leah hadn’t been able to tell that they were nearby. She had caught a few words every once in a while, snatches of conversation that she’d tried very hard to tune out:

“—have to tell—”

“He’s not ready f—”

“—can’t just keep it from him, Stiles, you kn—”

“—later, when he’s had some re—”

There was only so much Leah could do to curtail her senses, no matter how much she wished otherwise. She had concentrated on the crackle and pop of the campfire and the thump of Derek’s heartbeat beside her and waited for the voices to go out of range again.

Derek had sat up for a good while after Leah had pulled her borrowed patchwork blanket out and rolled her mostly-empty backpack into a makeshift pillow. It wasn’t comfortable, per se, but it was better than grass and dirt, better than anything she’d had in a while. If Derek hadn’t been so close and so on edge, she might actually have fallen asleep quickly and stayed that way for once.

Derek had given in eventually and laid down too, apparently unconcerned with his own lack of bedtime accoutrements despite the fine shivers that sometimes wracked his frame. Leah had considered offering him her blanket, but some instinct told her that gesture wouldn’t have gotten any more positive of a response than the canned fruit would have, so she had just pulled it tighter around herself in sympathy.

Even when Derek was quiet for minutes on end, his heart rate never slowed to the easy rhythm of sleep, and the moments of tranquility didn’t last for long. Leah lay very still to compensate for his restlessness, hyper-aware of each rustle of cloth and huff of breath beside her. After another ten minutes or so of fidgeting, Derek rolled over one more time and heaved a sigh.

“Can you hear them?” he asked.

Leah pushed herself onto her back so that she could look at him. He was on his back too, staring up at the sky with an expression that bordered on petulant, but his scent was heavier than that, thick with anxiety and something like anger.

“They’re out there,” Leah assured him. “They’re both fine.”

“Can you _hear_ them, though?” Derek asked, more insistently.

Leah frowned at his profile, limned in firelight. If she strained her ears she could make out the mutter of low voices still, but when she did, the harsh call of some kind of bird that was much closer than her human targets stabbed at her eardrums and made her flinch. She shook her head, trying to rein it back in and escape the magnified noises of the forest, but she had never exactly figured out how to do that. It’s why she never tried to use her senses for things like this; she actively _avoided_ it most of the time.

“Not what they’re saying, if that’s what you mean,” she told Derek. “Why?”

For a long minute she thought that he wasn’t going to answer, that he would put his back to her and pretend to be asleep even though he knew damn well that it wouldn’t fool her in the slightest. But then he let out another sigh, deeper than the last. He glanced over at her before turning his eyes skyward again, staring up at the multitude of stars that peeked out from between the patchy clouds.

“I just...I’ve never _not_ been able to hear them before,” he admitted. “I know they’re out there, but I can’t hear them at all. Not their voices or their footsteps or their heartbeats. I can’t even hear _your_ heartbeat, and you’re right here!”

He reached up to rub at his ear, a rough gesture that was as frustrated as it was fruitless. Now that she knew what to look for, Leah could see the way he kept one ear turned toward the forest even when he was lying down, his head cocked like that might provide him with better reception somehow.

“It’s not so much that I want to know what they’re talking about,” he said, “even though I’m _sure_ they’re keeping things from me—”

Leah was glad for the dark; it hid the flush of shame that overtook her face as she recalled the bits and pieces that had reached her over the last hour or two. Derek’s friends were definitely keeping things from him, and that was not something Leah wanted to know, _not_ something she wanted to be in the middle of. Not when she wasn’t sure what it was they were hiding, and certainly not when it wasn’t her place to clue Derek in on it. So many secrets and none of them hers to tell.

“—it’s just that...even if I _didn’t_ eavesdrop before, I always knew that I _could._ If I needed to. I knew I would be able to hear it if they needed me, or if someone was coming. _Jesus._ ” Derek scrubbed his hands over his face. “Earlier, I nearly took Stiles’ head off just because I couldn’t catch his scent. I didn’t know who he was and I panicked because I’ve never not had scent to rely on. How do humans live without it?”

“You were born a werewolf, weren’t you?” Leah asked. “You’ve always been one?”

“Always,” Derek said, and his scent was so thick and complicated that Leah had to rub her nose to keep from sneezing. “And now...it’s like I’ve gone deaf and blind overnight. Like I’m wrapped up in wool and underwater at the same time. And it’s driving me crazy.”

“If I could give you my senses, I would,” Leah said. “You could have them all right now. Hell, I’d love to get rid of them.” She laughed even though she wasn’t joking, not in the slightest. “Maybe I should go out and get myself snatched by the Warlock,” she said. “If he’s taking werewolfism away now instead of killing people, he sounds like my guy.”

Derek turned his head toward her, eyebrows pulled down into a tight V.

“You really hate it that much?”

Leah bit her lip hard and kicked herself repeatedly in her mind. That was probably a horribly insensitive thing to say to someone who had had his werewolfism—his entire identity from the day he was born—taken away from him by force. She had insulted his heritage and now he was going to hate her and not want her to stick around, and if Derek didn’t want her there then the others wouldn’t either and she would have to go back to running again. All because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut and refrain from putting her foot in it.

“No offense?” she tried.

Derek snorted and turned away, but he didn’t seem mad or even resentful that she had what he wanted and wished she didn’t.

“It’s not that I think being a werewolf is a bad thing,” Leah rushed to say. “I’m sure it’s great for some people, but I’m just...not good at it, I guess. I’m not built for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I—”

A log in the fire cracked in two, the pieces falling apart with a thump that couldn’t have been half as loud as it seemed to her, and Leah almost jumped out of her skin. The sizzle and smell of boiling sap hit her, overlaid with the continuing rustle of wildlife and so many bird calls and the shushing of the wind through thousands of leaves all at once, and—

“It’s just too much,” she said.

She threw off her blanket, feeling hot and stuffy even in the cool night air, and sat up to rub at her ears like Derek had done earlier.

“Everything is so fucking _loud_ and I can’t make it stop. I overhear things I don’t want to overhear, and I smell people’s emotions! I mean, god, how invasive is that? I have no right knowing how scared you are unless you want to tell me, but I know it anyway and I _hate_ that. I hate that I can’t _not_ sense these things, and I hate that I can’t fight the moon, and I hate that I have no fucking control over myself anymore and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I hate that—”

It wasn’t until warm fingers came to rest on the back of her hand that Leah realized her claws were out, digging holes into the thick fabric of her pants. She hadn’t dropped fangs yet, thank god, but she was certain her eyes were glowing behind closed lids and she squeezed them shut tighter.

Derek was gentle when he pried her grip loose, unhooking her claws one at a time until he could hold her hand in his. Leah let him, taking deep breaths to try and force the shift back, to chase the itch off her skin and back inside her where it couldn’t hurt anyone. Derek was human now, after all, just as breakable as any other human. Leah knew exactly how much damage her claws could do to a poor, defenseless creature like he had become.

That particular memory didn’t serve to calm her down any, but Derek wasn’t afraid. His heartbeat was steady and soothing, his scent far less anxious than it had been when he was focused on his own losses instead of hers. His thumb rubbed circles into her palm, over and over again until her pulse slowed to match the sweep of it.

“Do you have an anchor?” he asked when she had managed to drag her claws back in.

Leah gave him a sidelong look, nonplussed.

“Do I look like a sailboat to you?”

Derek laughed again, low and easy.

“Not a literal anchor,” he said. “It’s figurative—a technique to help wolves keep control of themselves during the full moon or in high stress situations.”

“What kind of technique?”

“It’s different for everyone,” Derek said. “It can be a person, someone you care about. It can be a treasured memory. It can even be a more abstract concept like a feeling. For the longest time, my anchor was anger. That’s what kept me moving forward, gave me the strength to face each day. I held onto that feeling when I felt like I was losing control and it always kept me grounded.”

With him still rubbing soft, soothing circles into her palm and looking at her with a small smile on his face, Leah had trouble believing that Derek could have ever been motivated by something so aggressive. Stiles she would’ve believed it of, but Derek didn’t seem half as hostile or combative as he did. Even fresh out of a four-year-long hostage situation, he wasn’t nearly as upset as Leah would’ve been in his place. Whatever anger Derek had held onto for so long and relied upon so heavily, it felt like he had let go of it.

Maybe he had found something else to ground him, before he had been taken. He’d said it could be a person, and Leah found herself thinking of the way he and Stiles had clung to each other so tightly earlier, Stiles’ palpable grief when Derek’s name had first been mentioned and then the way he had panicked so intensely at the thought of Derek being in any kind of trouble, Derek’s relief when Stiles had come for him. They hadn’t said or done anything explicitly romantic, but they were definitely something to each other. Or they _had been_ something, at least, before.

Leah shook her head, her throat tight. Her eyes fell to the flickering fire so that they didn’t have to meet Derek’s.

“I don’t have anything like that,” she said.

Derek’s thumb slowed and stopped, but he didn’t let go of her hand.

“None of it?”

Leah had been traveling alone for years, never stopping anywhere long enough to have attachments. She had left everything and everyone behind six years ago and those memories, the ones she should have been able to treasure and hold onto, were tarnished. She never thought of those if she could help it.

And the feeling, the _anger..._ she didn’t dare. Anger was wild, it was impulsive, and more than anything else, it was dangerous. Anger brought with it the itchy-heat behind her eyes and the pinch of claws at her fingertips. It made her into something she didn’t want to be. She couldn’t afford to get angry.

She shook her head once more but didn’t dare try to speak again, and for the hundredth time she was glad that no one else around her was any breed that could pick up on her chemosignals; guilt was a very distinctive scent if you knew how to recognize it.

“That’s okay,” Derek said gamely. “We can find you something to—”

A snapping twig had Leah scanning the forest’s edge in an instant, even knowing that the sound was still too far off for her to get a visual. Footsteps coming closer, two pairs of them, not moving in any hurry.

Derek went tense, his grip on her hand tightening. He turned to follow her line of sight and the tendon in his neck stood out in stark relief as he strained to hear whatever it was that she was hearing. It was almost painful to watch, his struggle, and Leah squeezed his hand back.

“It’s just Stiles and Allison,” she said. “They’re on their way back.”

Derek acknowledged her with a nod, but the tight clench of his jaw didn’t relax until his friends broke the treeline. Some of the tension drained out of him at the sight of Stiles, tired-looking and grim but unharmed, and he mustered up a small smile for Allison when she offered one of her own.

Leah smiled too, because Allison’s warmth was infectious and it sort of felt good to have a reason to smile for once, until a prickle on the back of her neck let her know she was being watched. She turned to see Stiles shrugging off his backpack on the far side of the fire. His eyes were fixed low, where her fingers were tangled with Derek’s, his face blank and unreadable. She tugged her hand free and reached for her blanket instead, pulling it back over herself like it would protect her from Stiles’ unnervingly direct gaze.

“Perimeter’s secure,” Allison said, settling down with her own blanket. “In case you were wondering.”

Derek let out a sharp breath through his nose that might have been a polite way of snorting in disbelief. He might not have Leah’s hearing, but it was clear that he still knew his friends well enough to tell that there was no perimeter at all. He didn’t call them out on it directly, though. He just took the extra blanket Stiles tossed his way.

“You should all get some sleep,” Stiles said. “We’ve got a long walk back to Headquarters in the morning.”

Leah noticed that he didn’t include himself in the sleeping category, which meant he was probably intending to stay awake all night to keep watch. Judging from his quiet sigh, Derek hadn’t missed that implication either and wasn’t happy about it, but he just shook his head and lay down with his back to Stiles. This time his heartbeat mellowed out quickly, exhaustion pulling him under in minutes.

It took Leah a long time to follow him into sleep but Stiles was still awake by the time darkness overtook her, his eyes never straying from Derek’s sleeping form.


	3. it's not your cross to bear, don't try and save me

The three of them set off toward Headquarters as soon as the sun began creeping over the pines, throwing long, slanted sunbeams across their faces to nudge them out of their sleep. Derek lingered at the edge of the clearing, smelling of old sadness and a hint of longing, but he just pulled the jacket he'd borrowed from Leah—his own was deemed too holey to be effective anymore and Leah was the one of them least affected by the chill in the air—tighter around his shoulders and stepped into the shade of the forest with a quiet sigh.

It was deemed unnecessary for them to take the downtown route on the way back. Time was no longer of the essence and they could afford to take the slower but safer route, heading north to skirt the edge of town before cutting east again through less populated areas.

The only problem was Derek's stamina: he didn't have any. His steps were slow and heavy compared to the rest of them, even though they all carried supplies and he didn't, and he was struggling for breath after just a few city blocks. He tried to push on, stubborn as anything, but eventually even _he_ seemed to accept that he wasn't well enough for a prolonged slog like this. When the group stopped for yet another "water break," far sooner than could be argued away, he didn't voice any complaint, just slumped against the nearest wall to get his breath back.

The trek out had been made largely in tense silence, but that tension had been worried, almost anticipatory. This one was...awkward, but the painful kind of awkward that bordered on truly uncomfortable. Allison led the way, scouting ahead and making sure the path forward was clear of any hostile parties. Stiles stayed by Derek's side, close but never touching like some strange, overprotective bodyguard despite Derek's increasing frustration with the hovering.

Leah trailed along behind them, ostensibly guarding the rear against potential attack but mostly just trying to stay upwind of the storm of chemosignals that centered around the two of them. She found that she much preferred the pervasive undertone of dried blood and fear that was sunk into the city streets; at least that was familiar and, best of all, uncomplicated.

Sometimes, when he had the energy for it, Derek asked questions. He really had missed a lot in the last four years and the way he stared at the broken-down buildings all around him said that they had probably still been standing when last he had seen them.

Leah tried to remember what Beacon Hills had looked like four years ago, how Derek must remember it, but at that time Leah had still been trying to find a way to get across the border to safer territory, to Nevada or Arizona. It had been seven months before she had admitted defeat and let the Hunters chase her northward again. She couldn't recall much of that time. She didn't want to.

Stiles answered all of Derek's questions in much the same way he and Allison had Leah's the day before. He explained about their organization, about what they did for the city and what was left of its population. He told Derek about the barricade around the region and the Hunters manning it without governmental mandate. He spoke with pride about Agent McCall and his sympathetic contacts, and about Christ Argent working both sides of the conflict to provide them with what they needed to keep going.

Stiles did a lot of talking, very convincing talking, and it wasn't until she caught sight of the heavy scowl on Derek's face that Leah realized what he _wasn’t_ saying.

He made no mention of his— _their_ —pack. No matter what question Derek asked or how he phrased it, Stiles found a way around and around, talking in circles until it _felt_ like he had answered even though he hadn't. Damn, he would make one hell of a politician with slick verbosity like that, but Derek had known him for a long time and he wasn’t as easily fooled as Leah was. Derek knew all Stiles’ tricks, and his scent was growing stormier and stormier the longer Stiles avoided giving him any straight answers.

Nothing Stiles had said in the last hour was a _lie,_ strictly speaking, but even with her limited social interactions in recent years Leah knew well enough how effective half-truths and omissions could be against werewolf hearing. If she hadn't known for a fact that Stiles was sidestepping the truth, she would never have guessed. But she did know that he was hiding something, and Derek knew it too.

Leah fell back another step, longing heartily for the days of old when she could have popped in a pair of headphones, queued up a playlist on her iPod, and blocked out the world. Alas, that time was long gone and there was nothing to stop her from hearing every word of the soon-to-be argument ahead of her.

"—past the batty banshee on the south side to make it out to Melissa's," Stiles was saying, scanning every side street and every rooftop in the vicinity, though Leah didn't doubt he was a hundred and ten percent aware of Derek no matter where his eyes were focused. "Liam and Mason can handle it, though. And Melissa's always been able to hold her own."

"Yeah, she has," Derek said pointedly. "She was training with Kira, wasn't she? How's that going?"

"She doesn't need training anymore, that's for sure," Stiles said. "Just a few weeks ago, I saw her round-house kick a werecoyote in the face and he went _down._ I tell you, it was something to see, and—"

"That _is_ impressive," Derek interrupted. "Werecoyotes are tough. Malia can always take a hell of a punch and come back swinging. Isn't that right, Stiles?"

"This one certainly couldn't. He turned tail the second Melissa pulled her knife. It wasn't even one of the charmed ones, either, just plain silver. The charm isn't easy, but I picked it up from this witch I ran into a few years back and it's really nifty. Ingredients are hard to find, though. You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get a hold of—"

"For god’s sake, Stiles, _stop._ "

Derek stopped in the middle of the street, making Stiles pull up short and turn back to face him.

"Do you need another break?" Stiles asked, already pulling off his backpack and rummaging around in it. "I've still got some jerky if you're hungry. How are you feeling, anyway?"

"I'm feeling a lot less stupid than you seem to think I am," Derek said boldly.

Stiles' heart rate picked up, though his expression of simple concern remained steady.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It _means,_ " Derek growled, "that you're handling me with kid gloves."

"Of course I am, Derek," Stiles said readily. "You've been through an ordeal. You can't blame me for being a little overprotective right now."

"I've been through plenty of ordeals before," Derek reminded him. "But being physically weakened doesn't make me an idiot, Stiles."

Stiles frowned, dropping his backpack to dangle from one hand.

"I never said you were an idiot, Der. I would never say that."

"Well, you're certainly treating me like one! You think I don't know what you're doing?"

"I'm not doing anything," Stiles argued. His tone was light, innocent-sounding, but the hand that wasn't holding onto his backpack strap had tightened into a fist at his side.

"Bullshit," Derek shot back. "You're _playing_ me."

Stiles forced a laugh, but it wasn't very convincing. The grip on his pack was white-knuckled now and the rapid thump of his heart was loud in Leah's ears even as she plastered herself against the nearest building and tried her damnedest to become one with the brickwork.

"Playing you?" Stiles repeated, no doubt going for surprised and disbelieving. "You really think I would do that?"

"That’s not a denial!" Derek said, throwing his hands up. “And I know you would!”

"Oh really? You _know,_ do you?"

Leah cringed; Stiles hadn't even made an effort to sound innocent that time. His scent was edging away from anxiety and toward anger, the charged lightning smell of it sharp and clear and easily matched by Derek's agitation.

"Yes!" Derek said. "I _know._ Because I know _you,_ Stiles, and I know how you work."

"No, you don't," Stiles snapped, eyes flashing in the sunlight until they almost looked like the unnatural gold of a beta.

Derek wasn't impressed. He pushed forward into Stiles' space, ignoring the gritted teeth and the clenched fists and every other warning sign that Stiles was nearing the end of his rope.

"You're lying to me," Derek insisted. "I don't need your heartbeat to tell me that. I never have, Stiles. I know you better than that."

"You don't know a damn thing about me," Stiles said, harsh and cutting as he jerked away from Derek's approach.

Derek stopped, a hand outstretched like he had meant to touch Stiles but didn't dare to now. Leah couldn't see the look on his face from where she was, and she was grateful for that. She put her hands over her ears, but it wasn't anywhere near enough to block out raised voices so close.

"Of course I do, Stiles," Derek said, his hurt obvious even in his heated tone. "I know you better than anyone. You're the man I—"

"But I'm _not,_ Derek!" Stiles shouted, the sound of it echoing off the walls all around them.

Leah flinched, pressing her palms harder against her ears. Even Derek stepped back from the force of it, and again when Stiles advanced on him, red-faced and furious.

"I'm not that man anymore, don't you get it?" Stiles demanded. "You have no idea who I am—who I've had to become! I hate to break it to you, Derek, but the sweet, clever, innocent kid you knew and loved all those years ago is long gone."

"I don't believe that," Derek said, shaking his head.

"That doesn't make it any less true. I—"

A shout rang out down the street, followed by running footsteps. When Leah lowered her hands from her ears, she heard more pairs of feet slapping against the asphalt, several more of them, and other voices heading their way.

Allison skidded into view with her bow in her hand, arrow nocked, and called out, "Guys, I really hate to break up the lovers' spat, but we've got incoming. Three werecoyotes and a wendigo."

Stiles cursed fluently under his breath. He had his extendable metal staff in hand a second later, then he was throwing his backpack at Leah's feet and giving Derek a shove in her direction as well.

"Watch him," he told her. "Keep him safe at all costs."

Leah nodded obediently and took hold of Derek's arm, trying to drag him back into the shadow of the building. Derek didn't come easily, though.

"Wait, what?" he said instead, alarm all over his face as he watched Allison scale her way up to a rooftop vantage point and leave Stiles standing alone in the middle of the street, right in the path of the group of hostiles, near enough now that even he could hear their approach.

"Derek, come on," Leah said, tightening her grip on his arm. "Stiles and Allison have got this."

"No!" he said, trying to tug himself free, fighting to get back to Stiles' side.

Leah grit her teeth, hating herself just a little bit as she wrapped an arm around Derek's chest and held him back. It wasn't difficult. He was bigger than her by a good bit, yes, and fueled by his sudden panic, but he was also underfed and exhausted and _human._

"No, you don't understand," Derek tried to tell her. "One human can't take on four of them, and Stiles isn't a fighter!"

"Oh boy, are you in for a surprise," Leah muttered.

Derek yelled Stiles' name as the makeshift pack came pelting out of the same alleyway Allison had, tripping over each other and scenting the air with relish. Stiles didn't so much as flinch. He spun the staff over his head and brought it down in a ready stance, a feral grin on his face that all but dared them to give him an excuse to kick their asses.

Stiles was every bit as quick as he had been the day before and twice as vicious, taking all his aggravation out on the poor, unsuspecting saps who had made the terrible mistake of challenging him. Werecoyotes were ferocious by nature, typically much less tightly controlled than the average werewolf and therefore more dangerous in a one on one fight, but Stiles put one after the other on their backs and made damn sure they stayed there.

In the end, Allison didn't need to fire a single arrow, not even at the wendigo when he tried to catch Stiles from behind. The staff's silver blade tore through his neck like tissue paper, leaving a spray of pungent red across the pavement, and Stiles was left standing over four unmoving bodies after only a few minutes.

Derek had gone still in Leah's hold, too stunned to fight anymore, and he stayed that way when Leah let go. His heart thudded out of rhythm, seeming doubly loud after all the clashing and shouting of the fight was gone. He swayed on his feet, the strain of his own struggle catching up to him now that the adrenaline surge had passed, and Leah steadied him with a hand on his back.

Stiles stayed where he was, breathing hard from exertion but largely unharmed, as Allison clambered down from her perch. He didn't look up from the dead wendigo as she checked on Derek and Leah to make sure they were alright.

Leah waited for him to drop to his knees again, to take out his knife and open a cut on his wrist, to whisper obscure words of power for an even more obscure purpose like he had after his fight the day before, but he didn't. Instead he sent Derek one quick, sidelong look and turned his back on the bodies. He wiped the blood off his staff's blade with Allison’s red-stained rag, collapsed it, and tucked it into his backpack when Allison handed it to him.

"Let's go," he said gruffly, already moving off down the road as if the battle had been nothing more than a nuisance, "before all the fuss attracts more party-crashers."

Leah frowned at Stiles' back, and then at Allison when the former predictably yielded no answers. Allison just shook her head, her eyes too darting almost imperceptibly to the still pale and wide-eyed Derek before she strode forward to walk at Stiles' side, leaving Leah to take up Stiles' former position at Derek's.

Apparently whatever magic it was that Stiles worked on the people he killed, it was even more of a secret from Derek than it was from her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Leah volunteered to keep watch that night in the hopes that she could patrol the block around the mostly-intact building where they had holed up and thereby escape from the oppressive atmosphere, but that plan got vetoed almost immediately. In the mid-city like this, surrounded by half-feral supernaturals spoiling for a fight, it was far too dangerous for one person to be out on their own, even if that person were a werewolf or a lethally trained human with lots of weapons.

Apparently this was one of those “important things” that Stiles saved up his magic for. He laid down wards that would hide them from view and block their scents from getting out to attract anyone who might prey on them, but the spells only worked so long as they all stayed within the boundaries of the camp. Which mean that the four of them were trapped together in close proximity until sunrise.

Stiles paced around the perimeter, checking over and over that his spells were holding and ignoring the way Derek was staring a hole into the side of his head from where he sat, silent and shivering even in Leah’s jacket, against the far wall. Allison sat cross-legged between them and took to sharpening her various knives, the _shing_ of a whetstone over the blades loud in the absence of conversation, and studiously pretending not to notice the tension.

As soon as she had finished off the last of her rations, Leah lay down as far away as she could get from the rest of them, tucked under a large hole in the northern wall that Stiles assured them no one could see through as long as the wards held. She wrapped herself up as tightly as possible in her blanket, pulling it up over her head so that all she could smell was herself and the old-worn scent of the fabric, and counted her own heartbeats until sleep blessedly overtook her.

Again, they set off as soon as it was light enough for safe traveling, wending their way through mostly empty streets toward their goal. They made it to the center of the city without encountering any more roving packs looking to test their mettle. Only one stray omega crossed their path, but he turned tail and ran before Stiles could say "scram." It was probably for the best, even though Stiles looked a little disappointed at losing the opportunity to blow off more steam.

He and Derek hadn't said a single word to each other since their fight the day before. They both obviously _had_ more to say but couldn't seem to bring themselves to say it just yet, both too angry and hurt and whatever the hell else they were, so they bit their tongues and averted their eyes and let Leah and Allison walk in between them whenever possible.

The girls exchanged uncomfortable looks and let the two of them stew in their angst, since there wasn't much they could do about it themselves. Stubborn boys would be stubborn no matter what anyone else had to say about it.

They made it to Headquarters before the sun reached its zenith the next day and Leah had never been so relieved. Even the awful whine of the wards in her sensitive ears wasn’t enough to discourage her when there was a building with a roof and real beds and actual _showers_ on the other side of it. And also, hopefully, enough room to get away from the drama that was Derek and Stiles, at least until they had worked out their shit. When they crossed the line of ward-stones and the buildings reformed themselves in front of her eyes, Leah heaved a sigh and picked up the pace.

Stiles pressed his palm to the door and the symbols all around it glowed to life. That was a relatively new feature too, judging by the way Derek's eyebrows rose at the sight of it, but Stiles didn't stop to explain how it worked or chatter on about where he had learned the spell and how much effort it had taken to implement, or anything like that. He just pushed forward into the building, expecting the rest of them to follow in his wake.

Leah was barely over the threshold before she was struck by the sheer _muchness_ of it. When she had been here last, it had only been from late at night until early morning. The most people she had seen there at one time had been in the upstairs conference room where she had first seen Stiles, and that had only been a dozen at most. Now, though, there were at least twice that on the first floor alone, scurrying back and forth, carrying crates of supplies, calling out as they squeezed past each other in the narrow hallways. It was just...it was a _lot._

Stiles was immediately waylaid by Mason, who waved his clipboard in the air and fired off a spiel about some necessary preparations that had been thrown off schedule and how much it would push them back. His voice was loud enough on its own, but there were at least three other conversations going on in the hallway at the same volume, and too many heartbeats to count, and someone was _stampeding_ up the stairs like a goddamn elephant, and the air was thick with sticky-fruit smell and gun oil and sweat and old wood and ozone-magic.

_Too fucking much._

Leah shoved her way through all the people, away from the excruciatingly loud shouts that rang out as those who had known Derek from before finally recognized him. She tripped her way into the dormitory and collapsed on the nearest bed, fighting back the shift as it clawed at her insides. It was quieter in here, calmer, and the overwhelmed feeling ebbed after a few long minutes to leave her with a pounding head and a fervent hope that none of this would happen again.

Only it did, over and over.

It wasn't just that Headquarters was busy. Sure, it was noisy and crowded and there was always someone doing something somewhere, but Leah could have adjusted to that if only it were _constant._ But the warded doors, the ones that had been put in place to prevent those with supernaturally enhanced hearing from eavesdropping on conversations they weren't meant to be a part of, didn't just block intelligible words, they blocked out everything: voices, footsteps, heartbeats, scents, chemosignals, _everything._

And that meant that every time someone opened one of those doors, all of it came flooding out at once to smack Leah in the damn face like a hammer, and then it would all get cut off again the next time someone closed the stupid door. And there were doors like that all over the place, little hidey holes for the transmission of sensitive information, which there seemed to be a lot of. She had only been there for less than eight fucking hours and she already had sensory whiplash.

By the time the dinner hour had come and gone, Leah was ready to scream. However, she knew from personal experience that that would only exacerbate the situation, and so she did the next best thing: she ran. Only she couldn’t run outside because it was getting dark again and darkness in the city meant danger, so she ran inward. Or, well, _upward._

The first floor was the most crowded. It was where the up-for-grabs beds and showers were, as well as where the majority of the heavier, harder to transport supplies were kept. The second floor housed the more permanent residents, like Stiles and Allison, Mason and Liam, and had more storage spaces filled to the brim with stuff that was constantly being taken out and replaced as more shipments of goods came in. There were still people in and out of there on the regular.

The third floor, though, was made up almost entirely of warded conference rooms that were rarely used.

It took some doing for Leah to get up there unnoticed—honestly, she wasn't entirely sure she was _allowed_ to be in any of those rooms, and normally she wouldn't dare to trespass but this was an emergency situation and she would worry about possible consequences later when her head didn't feel like it was about to explode—but she managed it. She picked a random warded room, threw herself inside, and shut the door with a snap.

The general hustle and bustle of the other floors disappeared in an instant and the sudden silence rang in her ears almost as loudly. She slumped forward to press her sweat-damp forehead against the wood in the hopes that it would chase away the smothering heat that had come over her, but it wasn't enough and she couldn't seem to stop the way her hands shook and her fingertips itched. Her eyes were burning with the need to shift and it was _stupid_ that she reacted this way, for fuck's sake, just because of a little noise?

She tried to take deep breaths, in through her nose and out through her mouth, and focus on the taste of the air in here, blessedly free of other people's scents and chemosignals.

But not completely free of it, she realized belatedly. There was something there, something besides the smell of the building itself. A scent she recognized, when it filtered through the haze enough for her to place it: earth and forest and still waters.

No, no, no, he couldn’t be here. She was supposed to be getting _away_ from everyone, away from all the heartbeats and scents that took over her senses and drove her mad and sent her wolf into a frenzy. Away from anyone she could _hurt_ if the wolf broke free.

She spun around to see Derek sitting on the floor across from her.

He had showered, obviously, and someone had attacked his hair with scissors and gotten him new clothes. Even his facial hair had been trimmed down into something that looked less like a small woodland creature had died on his face and more like a respectable beard. He looked almost civilized again. He also looked justifiably taken aback at her sudden entrance.

"Are you okay?" were the first words out of his mouth.

Leah would have said yes but her breath was coming too fast, too irregularly, for her to manage it. She pressed herself back against the door, turning her head away so he wouldn’t see the gold in her eyes that she couldn’t force out. She couldn’t make it _stop,_ couldn’t make the wolf under skin stop clawing at her and howling for release, for a chance to lash out when everything around her felt like a threat.

That still-water scent hit her again, harder, closer. She opened her eyes to see Derek right in front of her and tried to jerk back, out of range of the fragile human that would break so easily when she really lost it, but there was nowhere for her to go with the door at her back.

“Leah,” Derek said, his voice soft and unafraid. “You need something to focus on. You need an anchor.”

“I don’t have one,” Leah growled, her gums prickling with the need to drop fangs. She didn’t have anyone or anything. She was completely alone, lost in the storm and slamming against the metaphorical rocks with every tidal wave, and there was nothing she could do about it but wait to drown.

“Use me.”

Leah whimpered. She turned away again but she couldn’t close her eyes this time, not when she knew what face she would see when she did: brown eyes bright with concern until fear took over, the upturned nose just like hers until it was broken and bent, blond hair darkened with blood, blood dripping down, blood everywhere and the _screaming,_ so much fucking screaming—

“Leah, look at me!”

Derek took her face in his hands and everything in her pushed to _attack_ but she was frozen in place, every muscle locked up tight by her own fear.

“Listen to my heartbeat, Leah,” he said. “Just look me in the eye and focus on the beat of my heart, can you do that? You are safe here. You are the one in control, not your instincts. Just focus on me and let my presence anchor you.”

Derek’s eyes weren’t just blue like she had thought. There was blue in them but also green, some brown around the center, even some almost gold mixed in. They were so different from the eyes that stared back at her from her memories, nothing like her brother’s plain brown, and they held her gaze steadily when everything around her was spinning like a top. The wide, warm palms on her cheeks held her in place and kept her from spinning with it while the _thump-thump_ of his heart sounded in her ears.

He wasn’t afraid, not like Justin had been. Justin’s heart had raced like a jackrabbit’s, his scent acid-sharp and terrified, but Derek was still just earth and water and worry as he shushed her, talking low and easy like he knew the tone was far more important than the words.

_Thump-thump._

There was no threat here, nothing to fight and nothing to hide from. She was safe and her instincts were wrong.

_Thump-thump, thump-thump._

That itch in her fingertips and gums was fading, the creepy-crawly heat of the shift receding with every second that passed. Her eyes didn’t burn anymore.

_Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump._

Her lungs expanded smoothly, slow enough that the oxygen made it to her brain. The spinning room finally came to a jerky stop, and everything around her went still. There was nothing but the mish-mash of color that were Derek’s eyes and the beat of his heart, calm and constant.

“Feeling better?” Derek asked.

Leah nodded weakly, dislodging his hands. Not trusting her legs to keep her upright for much longer, she let herself slide down the door until she hit bottom and Derek followed her to the ground, sitting cross-legged in front of her.

“Do you know what set you off?” he asked.

He just sounded curious and not like he was demanding that she tell him, which was good because she wouldn’t. She didn’t think she could stand to tell him about Justin, not him or anyone else, not when the full moon was less than two weeks away. She wanted to be allowed to stay here as long as she could.

“You’re really good at that,” she said instead. “How did you know what to do? You were a born wolf. Somehow I doubt _you_ were ever affected like this.”

Derek shrugged, picking idly at a loose thread on his new-old cargo pants.

“Stiles used to have panic attacks,” he said. “I don’t know if he still does. But I do know that, as bad as they are for humans, panic attacks can be even worse for werewolves, what with the keener senses and the stronger fight-or-flight response.”

Leah let her head fall back against the wall with a thump, too tired to keep it upright anymore.

“Well, that’s what _I’m_ doing up here,” she said. “Hiding. What’s your excuse?”

“Also hiding,” Derek said with a wry smile. “Just for the exact opposite reason.”

“What do you mean?” Leah asked.

“You’re hiding from the noise, aren’t you?”

She nodded, and Derek shrugged again.

“The noise I’m used to,” he said simply. “It’s the silence that I’m hiding from. At least in here, I can pretend the wards are the reason I can’t hear or smell anything.”

There was nothing Leah could say to that, at least not anything that could make it better. It was terrible, what had happened to Derek, and the only thing that could get him through it was time. Time to adjust, time to accept his new circumstances, time to learn how to exist as something he had never been before. Heartfelt condolences wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good and no one in pain ever wanted pity.

Leah cleared her throat, wishing she could blame her awkwardness on how drained she felt from her freakout but knowing damn well she was just always a little bit awkward. She nudged the toe of her boot against Derek’s shin.

“Are you sure that’s all you’re hiding from?” she asked.

Derek looked stubborn for all of two seconds before he broke, looking down and scratching at his stubbled chin with an aggravated sigh.

“I swear to god, if one more person tells me to take it easy or have another nap, I’m gonna start bashing heads,” he grumbled. “I’m _human,_ not an invalid.”

Leah started to say something about how, when she met him, she had thought he was sick, what with the unnatural scent that hung around him, but she stopped.

A discreet sniff—or what she thought was discreet, but Derek’s raised eyebrow told her wasn’t actually very discreet at all—told her that the scent was almost gone. There was barely a hint of it now, fading and leaving nothing but his natural scent behind. It must have been a remnant of whatever spell the Warlock had performed on him, the one that had taken his spark from him, and now that Derek was adjusting physically and had had a good wash, it was disappearing fast.

“They’re just worried about you,” she said instead. “You’re their friend and they want you to be okay.”

“Scott is their friend too, though! And he’s still out there—” Derek gestured vaguely at the door, off toward wherever the Warlock had been keeping them. “—while we’re in here doing nothing! And every time I say something about it, Stiles waves me off like it’s not his best friend getting the life sucked out of him to power some megalomaniac’s pipedream of immortality. We should be _doing_ something, not waiting around here and taking fucking _naps._ ”

“Stiles said he would handle it,” Leah tried, even though she knew that Stiles hadn’t left headquarters all day. He had been running around non-stop, giving orders and hearing reports and making sure that everything his organization did for what was left of the community was running smoothly, but that was it. There had been no super secret strategy meetings, no brainstorming sessions on what to do next, not even another talk with Derek to see if he could tell them anything else of import.

Derek was right in that Stiles didn’t seem in much of a hurry to do what he had claimed he would.

“Stiles said a lot of things,” Derek muttered, yanking the loose thread off his pants and tossing it aside like _it_ was the source of his irritation.

Leah pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. She wished she could tell Derek what he needed to hear, but it wasn’t her place. She didn’t know the whole story or even a fraction of it, and what she _did_ know, she wasn’t supposed to. She certainly didn’t want to be the one to break the news that most of his pack was lost to him.

Of course, considering how upset Derek had gotten with Stiles yesterday for skirting around the subject, it would probably just be confirming his suspicions by now anyway. That wouldn’t make it hurt any less, though.

“I think Stiles is just focused on you right now,” she said. “He wants to make sure you’re okay before he takes any big risks. He really cares about you.”

Derek glanced up at her without raising his head, then went back to picking a new thread loose without responding.

“You two…” Leah said, hoping she wasn’t pushing her boundaries too hard. Just because Derek had held her hand and was talking to her like maybe he trusted her, that didn’t mean they were actually _friends_ or anything. But what did she have to lose? The worst he could do was tell her to butt out, right? It was worth asking. “You’re…together?”

“We _were,_ ” Derek said with a thin, unhappy smile. “I don’t know anymore. Everything’s changed so much since I was taken.”

Leah bit her lip.

“You mean, _he’s_ changed so much?”

“ _He_ says he’s changed,” Derek said with an impressive roll of his eyes. “And yeah, maybe he can fight better now than he did then. But he’s still pulling the same shit he did years ago. Pushing me away for whatever bullshit reason he’s thought up this time to convince himself he doesn’t deserve me. It’s not like I don’t recognize the signs; I did it to him first. But then I got over myself.”

“Was he your anchor?” Leah asked. “You said it used to be anger, but you don’t seem all that angry. I mean, obviously you’re kind of angry right now! But about something specific, not just angry in general.”

Derek laughed softly, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Yeah, he was,” he admitted. “Long before I let myself realize it. He was just always there for me, you know? Even when I didn’t deserve it so much. And this whole time, under that spell...all I could think about—when I could think anything—was getting out and getting back to him.”

“It sounds like you two had something really special,” Leah said, staunchly ignoring the jealous clench in her chest. “Just give it a little time. Everything’s messed up and stressful right now, but he’ll come around soon enough.”

“But until he does, Scott is the one suffering,” Derek said. “And everyone else the Warlock has locked up in there. Every minute Stiles puts this off is another minute for the Warlock to grow stronger. Every day he gets _that_ much closer to being unstoppable. If we don’t act soon—”

“If the Warlock is as powerful as you say, then what is Stiles supposed to do about it?” Leah asked. “If he’s that close to...to becoming _immortal,_ then how can anyone expect to stop him?”

“If anyone could manage it, it would be Stiles.”

“You really think he can do it?”

“Stiles always comes out on top,” Derek said. “It’s just what he does, no matter the odds. One way or another, he always finds a way.”

His heartbeat was strong and steady, his scent clear and head held high. He believed every word he said. It was a stark contrast to the way Stiles had radiated fear and doubt back in that clearing. That hadn’t exactly engendered a lot of confidence in Leah, but Derek knew Stiles better than she did. Derek truly believed in the Stiles he had known four years ago, and he could only have gotten stronger in the intervening years, right?

And besides, it wasn’t like there was anyone else jumping at the chance to face off with the Warlock. At this point, Stiles was sort of their only hope. So he was going to have to get over his issues, get off his ass, and at least _try._ For all their sakes.

Leah put a hand on Derek’s knee, squeezing.

“We’ll all find a way,” she said with far more surety than she felt. “Together.”

Derek covered her hand with his, smiling, but also raised an eyebrow at her that looked almost teasing.

“You’re in?” he asked.

“What can I say? I’m emotionally invested,” she said lightly. “Can’t change the channel halfway through the movie.”

Derek laughed and Leah laughed with him, and it was nice and warm and companionable and everything she had been missing for so goddamn long.

Emotionally invested was an understatement. She couldn’t possibly leave, not now that she knew these people and what they were facing. She would worry about them, if nothing else, about whether they would make it through whatever came their way in the next few days. And if they didn’t make it through, she would always wonder how much of a difference she could have made if she hadn’t run away.

She had been running away from things for a long time, always running, always alone. The perennial omega.

Maybe she didn’t have to be that all the time. Maybe just this once, she could stay for a while, even if it was only to see this through to the end. After that…well, she had survived on her own this long. She hoped knowing something else wouldn't make it harder when she had to move on.

“We can’t hide up here forever, can we?” she asked.

“No,” Derek agreed easily, but his grin edged toward mischievous and the wink he sent her was even more so. “But I think we deserve a few more minutes of peace, don’t you?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Leah stared at her hand, held up in front of her face by Derek’s larger one, with all the intensity she could muster up. She tried to imagine the tips of her claws poking through, forcing their way up through her nail beds and into existence by whatever mysterious, mystical mechanism allowed that to happen, but her fingers stayed firmly clawless and human.

Derek watched quietly, his face completely free of judgment or expectation, and damn if that didn’t make Leah want to show him what was what.

She grit her teeth and stared harder, trying to conjure up claws without the creeping heat of the full shift. She had never managed one without the other, not intentionally, but there had to be a way. She had seen plenty of werewolves pop claws just to carve up apples and open cans for dinner, so why could she only do it when engulfed in heart-stopping fear or murderous rage? It wasn’t fair that she was so goddamn _bad_ at this.

Heat pricked at her eyes as her frustration mounted, beta gold overtaking them even as her stupid fingers refused to produce the stupid fucking claws like she wanted and, _fuck,_ there was the creepy-crawly feeling on the back of her neck. It chased down her spine and all over, too strong and too fierce, out of control and _dangerous_ and she was gonna lose it right there in the middle of the dorm and—

“Hey.”

Derek’s thumb found her palm, gentle pressure and the soft sweep of it in circles. Leah took a deep breath and held it until it hurt, then let it out in a slow stream. She unclenched her other hand from where it was fisted in the patchwork blanket of the cot where they both sat, cross-legged across from each other and largely ignored by the people going about their business around them. When she opened her eyes—no longer glowing—Derek offered her a half-smile.

“You’re thinking too hard,” he said.

Leah made a face at him.

“You know, I really hate when people say that,” she said. “How do you think _harder,_ anyway? What does that even mean? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“You just like being contrary, don’t you?” Derek accused her.

“Very contrary,” she said with a smirk. “My parents made a mistake when they decided not to name me Mary.”

“Let me rephrase then,” Derek offered, though he was obviously fighting back a laugh. “You’re thinking about the wrong things, spiraling into panic, and working yourself up too much to function properly. So you need to find less distressing things to think about that can keep you calm.”

“Like an anchor, you mean?” Leah asked, sighing now.

Derek nodded, apparently pleased that she was catching on so quickly.

“I told you, I don’t have anything like that,” she told him yet again.

“Something will work for you,” Derek said, steadfast as anything. “We just have to find it. Now try it again, and remember: it doesn’t have to be as scary as you’re making it out to be.”

Leah let Derek drag her hand up between them again, maybe pouting a little bit. This was important, she reminded herself. If she had to be a monster, then she could at least be a better one.

A knock sounded behind them and Leah abandoned the impromptu training session gratefully despite Derek’s exasperation. Allison was leaning in the open door to the dormitory, watching them with a fond and mildly amused look on her face.

“Newbie wolf training?” she asked knowingly.

“I’ve been a werewolf for six years!” Leah protested, just on principle.

“And I’ve seen newly bitten preteens with better control,” Derek countered, reaching over to poke her in the ribs. She slapped his hand away with a half-hearted glare.

“Well, I came to check up on you both,” Allison said, “but it seems like you’re doing alright.”

“We’re fine,” Leah assured her.

“Derek?” Allison asked. “You’re feeling okay? You’ve eaten, you’re not tired or anything?”

“I’m _fine,_ ” Derek insisted, probably more strongly than was necessary. He wouldn’t have been half as harsh if it hadn’t been the fifth time in the last three hours that someone had asked him those same questions.

Allison held up her hands in surrender.

“Okay, okay. Just making sure,” she said. “We’ve never known anyone else to be affected like you were. Stiles just wants to keep an eye on the fallout.”

“There is no fallout,” Derek said. “I’m fine. And if Stiles is so concerned, then he should come see that for himself. Where even is he?”

Allison crossed her arms over her chest, pulling back momentarily to let someone else squeeze past her through the narrow doorway.

“He’s on a body run,” she told them finally.

Which meant absolutely nothing to either of them, if the blank look on Derek’s face was anything to go by.

“A...body run?” Leah asked. “What’s a body run? Do we even want to know what that is?”

“It’s an unpleasant but ultimately necessary task,” Allison said. “One that we took on because no one else was going to: cleaning up the streets.”

“You mean cleaning up the carnage,” Derek clarified, catching on much quicker than Leah was.

When it clicked, Leah’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh, god, you mean—”

Allison nodded, rocking back on her heels and letting her hair fall into her face.

“There are fights to the death all the time,” she said, her tone more dispassionate than the rest of her manner, closer to the all-business attitude of the Archer. “And the winner doesn’t usually stick around to see what happens to the loser. Someone has to take care of it or there would be bodies piled up on every street corner. Disease would skyrocket, it would be horrible.”

“No kidding,” Leah said weakly.

She thought back to all the fights she had borne witness to in the last week alone: the bodies she had stepped over without a thought on her way to find the Emissary, the wolves Stiles had fought off on their way to and from retrieving Derek, the omega she herself had killed. At least a dozen dead people in the span of three days, and yet the four of them hadn’t come across a single corpse in any of their travels that they hadn’t made themselves. Why had she never thought about that before?

“We used to give them all proper burials,” Allison said, shrugging. “As best we could when we didn’t even know their names, at least. Then there were just too many of them. We ran out of places to dig pretty quick. We try to do right by them, but they have to go somewhere. So now we burn them all.”

Burning human flesh was one horror Leah had yet to encounter, and she very much wanted to keep it that way. Just imagining the stench of it was enough to turn her stomach. That was a hell of a way for a person to go, no matter how well done by they were.

Maybe that was what Stiles had been doing, though, to the bodies of the people he had killed: doing right by them. Maybe it hadn’t been magic at all but some kind of last rites. Not any kind of last rites that she had ever seen before, but that made more sense than some kind of ritual, didn’t it?

“We send out a party every day,” Allison went on. “We’ve got informants all over the city, people who let us know where fights have gone down so we know where to concentrate our retrieval efforts. Stiles goes with them whenever he can, but they never stay out too long. They’re due back right about now, actually.”

In a remarkable show of convenient timing, the shuffle of footsteps and messy thumping of multiple heartbeats reached Leah’s ears right before the creak of the front door swinging open. Voices filtered down the hallway toward them, followed shortly by the speakers as they headed further into the building for the showers and yet another conference room that functioned as a mess hall.

Stiles trailed in behind his people and stopped in the doorway when Allison called his name, both hands buried as deep as possible in his pockets.

Derek stiffened, his hand slipping out of Leah’s even though Stiles wasn’t even looking at them. He shifted to sit properly on the edge of the bed, jaw working like he was chewing on his tongue.

“Any trouble?” Allison asked.

Stiles shook his head absently, still watching something over her shoulder.

“What was the count?” Derek asked.

Stiles head snapped around, like he was just realizing they were there. Or like he had been fully aware of their presence the whole time and had really hoped that he could get away with not acknowledging it. He swallowed, clearly wrong-footed as much by the topic of conversation Derek had chosen to engage in as anything else, and looked to Allison. She nodded that, yes, they did know what he had been doing and what exactly was being counted.

“Uh...seventeen,” he said. “Most of them from the south side. There’s a new pack trying to make a name for itself down there.”

“I hate when they make that much of a mess,” Allison sighed. “I’ll have to pay the alpha a visit myself soon if the area doesn’t stabilize, let the Archer give him a good scare.”

Stiles didn’t agree or disagree, just said, “Tom and his crew took the haul out back. They’re taking care of the disposal.”

He scuffed the toe of his boot along the floor, rubber squeaking against the wood. He wouldn’t look Derek in the eye, but at the same time he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes away for more than a second. They kept flicking back to Derek, running over him from head to toe before darting off again.

Derek, for his part, never looked away. He leveled Stiles with such a direct, expectant stare that even Leah squirmed a little in her seat, sympathetically shamed.

Neither of them really smelled angry anymore, so that was something. Derek was calm enough, with just a low level irritation that was mostly subsumed by something wistful and sad. Now that Leah knew for sure the two of them had been a _thing,_ it made sense; Derek missed Stiles, missed what they used to have together and didn’t seem to anymore. Not in the same way, at least, when Stiles was so determined to keep him at arm’s length.

Stiles’ scent was...weird, and not just because of the whole muted-and-distant thing. There was guilt there, several flavors of it that Leah’s relatively untrained nose couldn’t pick apart, and the same kind of longing as Derek. But there was something else too, something sweet. She knew she had smelled it before, back when Stiles had taken down that pack a few days ago, after he had done whatever it was he did to the bodies.

But that wasn’t what bothered her about it.

Leah tried to sniff subtly—more subtly than the last time—to get a better whiff of that scent. There was _something_ niggling at the back of her mind, something that felt like it should be important. Or concerning, maybe. Sickly sweet and ill, like decay, but with a sizzle to it that felt like magic. She had definitely smelled it somewhere else.

Derek’s hand landed on her knee. He was frowning at her, curious and a little worried. At some point in her sniffing, Stiles and Allison had picked up their conversation again, discussing something or other that didn’t mean much to her or Derek, but they were still near enough for that scent to nag at her.

“Do you smell something?” Derek asked, keeping his voice low.

Leah couldn’t stop herself from glancing at Stiles. Derek followed her line of sight and his frown deepened.

“Something on Stiles?” he pushed. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Leah said, though she doubted her delivery was very convincing. “It’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“ _Leah,_ ” Derek said. “It’s something. You wouldn’t have that look on your face if it wasn’t.”

He sounded almost disappointed, of all things, like he couldn’t even bring himself to be surprised that she was keeping things from him now as well. That tone hurt more than Leah would have expected it to.

“Just tell me,” he said. “Please. What do you smell?”

“Look, I don’t know, okay?” Leah admitted, leaning in closer so she didn’t have to speak above a whisper and risk drawing Stiles’ attention. “I don’t know what it is. Some kind of magic, I think, but I’m not sure. It’s just...it’s familiar, but I can’t remember from where.”

“What does it smell like exactly?” Derek asked, following her lead with the whispering.

“Like...like sugar,” Leah came out with. “But also _not._ Sort of like rotten cotton candy, if that makes sense. It’s not a good scent, not at all. It smells like...”

She rubbed her forehead, casting around in the jumble that was her sense memory for anything that could fit the bill, but there was so much of it. The world was a pungent place and she spent every hour of every day being assailed by one strong odor after another; it was hard not to get lost in them. Just focusing on one sense so intensely was making her head hurt, making her nose twitch and burn with everything around her now.

Derek took her hand. The touch was grounding and she clung on, turning all of her attention on him. _He_ was familiar, his heartbeat steady and even, his scent soothing and earthy and clean now that the sick magic scent had f—

“...like _you!_ ”

The words came out before the thought was even fully formed, before it could sink into her head that maybe—just maybe—she should _not_ give voice to it. The hand that flew up to cover her mouth was too late and Derek had already heard, his eyes widening in disbelief.

“What?”

Leah tried to backtrack, but nothing really coherent came out, just a stuttered, “O-oh, my god—”

“What do you mean, it smells like me?” Derek asked, his grip on her hand tight enough to hurt just a little bit. “Like magic and me, you said. Leah, _tell me._ ”

Leah cursed vehemently and pulled her hand away to rub at her nose. Now that she recognized the scent, it was every bit as cloying and sticky as it had felt to her the first time she had smelled it, back when she had met Derek on the side of the road. It was just as strong on Stiles, even muted, and she was sure it would linger in her nostrils for hours this time too, inescapable.

She told Derek just that, one eye on where Stiles still stood just outside the doorway, he and Allison now fielding questions from a young werecoyote with another of those omnipresent clipboards. With every word she spoke, Derek’s face paled that much more. In the end, it was obvious that he had reached the same conclusion that Leah was desperately trying to explain away.

Derek had no such rationalizing tendency. From one instant to another, Derek was on his feet and shouldering the werecoyote out of the way. He’d still had a hold of Leah’s hand and he didn’t let go, dragging her off the cot with him until they both stood before a very taken aback Stiles.

“Why do you smell like what he did to me?” Derek demanded.

Jesus, the man wasted no time, and he didn’t even bother to keep his voice down.

If Stiles had been taken aback before, he looked downright stunned now, and his heart rate skyrocketed. Any doubt in Leah’s mind was wiped out as the scent of fear wended its way through the sickly-sweet. She would’ve stepped back, gotten as far away from Stiles as she could get, but Derek was gripping her hand like a lifeline and still holding his head high. Abandoning him now would make her both a coward and an asshole.

She swallowed hard and held her ground despite the weak feeling in her knees and the way she could hear her blood rushing in her ears.

“Derek,” Stiles said carefully, “I don’t know what you think you—”

“Don’t,” Derek broke in. “Don’t you dare.”

It was sharp and angry and not at all discreet.

Stiles immediately cast a look around, panicked. There were a number of people in the dorm peering over at them curiously, at least half of them werewolves who would be able to hear every word they said no matter how quiet they tried to be, and more passing through the hallway. At least a dozen witnesses that Stiles clearly didn’t want.

Before Derek could get another word out, Stiles had his arm in a vise grip and was towing him down the hallway. Leah got hauled along too, Allison following close at her heel, and Stiles led them all into the nearest warded room, empty but for a table with what looked like a map of the city tacked onto it.

As soon as the door was shut behind them, sealing them away from prying ears, Derek yanked free of Stiles’ hold. His hand fell out of Leah’s in the same motion and she took the opportunity to fall back a ways, out of the line of fire. Allison too was keeping out of it, hovering by the door with her hand over her mouth.

“Well, at least it’s not just _me_ you’re keeping things from,” Derek said. “No, you’re lying to everyone around here. That’s good to know.”

“I’m not lying to them,” Stiles said. “I’m just not—”

“You’re just not telling them the truth,” Derek finished for him. “Yeah, that’s kind of how you work, isn't it? Just like you’ve been _not telling_ me a damn thing for the last three days and I am pissed about that, trust me, I am, but _this?_ ” He shook his head helplessly. “For god’s sake, Stiles, tell me you haven’t been messing with dark magic. Tell me you’re not doing the same thing that he is.”

Stiles licked his lips, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides as he searched for an escape route, some way to deflect or reroute the conversation.

“Why would you even think—”

Stiles’ eyes found Leah over Derek’s shoulder and widened in realization. For a split second, she thought he would fly at her, break out his staff or start throwing spells or something, anything to punish her for daring to make the connection and blow his cover. But he didn’t. He cursed under his breath, turning away from them all as both hands came up to rub across his face.

“What else was I supposed to do, Derek?” he asked, facing them again and holding his arms out only to let them drop limply to his sides. “He’s too strong. He is so goddamn strong, Der, how else am I supposed to counter that strength? I can’t take down a grenade launcher with a pistol.”

“So you stoop to his level?” Derek asked, disbelieving. “You fight fire with fire and give no heed to the consequences. Nevermind how fucked up it is to use and discard people for your own gain—to _hurt_ them—but I’ve seen what that magic has done to _him,_ Stiles. He’s not even human anymore! You’ve said yourself that magic like this is an incredibly corruptive force, _Jesus,_ it’s going to eat you a live!”

“How stupid do you think I am, Derek?” Stiles snapped. “Do you really think I would just dive into this without thinking it through?”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“Oh, come on, you should know me better than that,” Stiles said. “I did my research, like I always do. I found loopholes, okay? I exploit those.”

“Loopholes?” Derek asked, skepticism clear.

“Yes, Derek, loopholes. Even magic has a few.”

Stiles was pacing now, making short circuits around the small room like he was just too wound up to stand still. The dark magic scent was stronger, more concentrated in the enclosed space, and Leah thought she knew now why Stiles went out of his way to dampen his scent: to lessen the chance that anyone would do exactly what Leah had done, put two and two together to realize what methods he was using to achieve his own power.

“I know this magic is dark no matter how I spin it,” Stiles said, talking quickly like he thought Derek might interrupt him again before he could get his explanation out. “But the corruptive part comes from drawing power from an unwilling source, from using force to drain a living being against their will. It’s that act that will corrupt your own soul, destroy you piece by piece, but I found away around it.”

“How?” Derek demanded.

“The body runs,” Stiles told him. “You see, when people die, the energy from their spark doesn’t dissipate immediately. It takes time. If I get there first, I can siphon that power off for myself, and I’m not hurting anyone that way. I get a boost—albeit a much smaller one than it would be otherwise—but because the person isn’t alive anymore, they technically can’t be an unconsenting party.”

“They can’t consent to it if they’re dead!” Derek argued.

Stiles threw his hands up with a noise of aggravation.

“Well, they can’t _not_ — Look, that’s not the _point,_ Derek! I don’t have to fight them for it, I don’t have to use force, and it doesn’t damage my soul like it does the Warlock’s.”

“That’s a damn fine line to walk, Stiles. And how do you know that anyway?” Derek asked, his tone not conveying half the concern his scent was; there was anger there, of course there was, stormy and sharp, but it was undercut by a fear so pungent it almost made Leah whine. “How do you know for sure that this isn’t hurting you?”

“Look at me, Derek!”

Stiles held his arms out wide, spinning around in a circle to make a proper spectacle of himself.

“You’ve _seen_ the Warlock,” he said. “You’ve seen what it’s made of him. Do I look anything like that? I’ve been doing this for years now and I’m no different than I was before.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” Derek said on a growl.

“Jesus fuck, Der,” Stiles laughed, entirely unamused. “You’re going there? We’re really wanna talk about that now?”

“I don’t know, Stiles,” Derek said with exaggerated patience. “Talk about what? How you’ve avoided every other question out of my mouth since you found me? How you’ll talk yourself in circles to avoid telling me anything at all? How you don’t seem to trust me anymore?”

“Of course I do, Derek! It’s not about—”

But Derek cut him off, pushed forward into Stiles’ space and making him take a step back, talking over his stuttered excuses.

“Or maybe I’ll just stick to the topic of your newly acquired necromancy skills instead,” Derek said harshly. “How about that, Stiles, does that sound like a good topic of discussion?”

“Oh my _god,_ ” Stiles bit out, gripping his own hair tight in his fists as frustration edged more toward panic, “it’s not like that, it’s _not_ necr—”

“How did you even get this far, Stiles?” Derek interrupted again, ignoring the strangled, pained sound Stiles made as he stumbled another step back in the face of his condemnation. “I mean, really, who ever thought this was a good idea? _Lydia_ at least should have known better. How could she let you take this kind of risk? Why didn’t she put a stop to this befo—”

“ _Because I killed her!_ ”

Stiles outburst was so loud and the room so clouded with chemosignals that it took Leah a few seconds to parse the meaning of the words themselves. Honestly, she might not have needed to at all, not with the gasp that tore its way out of Derek’s throat and the way he swayed like he might collapse, not with the scents of Stiles’ grief and self-loathing so strong in her nose that her lungs refused to inflate and let them in.

The moment felt suspended, like time had paused itself, and yet it wasn’t still. Stiles was rocking on his heels, full of frenetic energy that was probably the urge to run, to escape, to get away from Derek and his own words, but he didn’t do any of that. He was pallid and his labored breathing was the only sound besides the pounding of four hearts, but he stayed.

“I—” His words stuck in his throat, the half-formed sounds that fell from his lips loud in the stunned quiet. “She’s g-gone,” he forced out. “They’re all… Derek, they’re all gone. I’m s-sorry, okay? I didn’t want… I’m sorry, Derek. I didn’t keep them safe. I tried and it wasn’t enough. I failed them, and now we’re all that’s left, and Lydia…”

Stiles stopped and swallowed hard, the thick scar on his throat rippling with the movement, and the guilt he was broadcasting was almost enough to bring Leah to her knees, even secondhand and muted by magic.

“I—I killed her,” he said again, quieter this time, like he could barely choke the words out.

Allison stepped up until her shoulder brushed against Leah’s, and Leah had to turn her face away from another wash of chemosignals, had to step sideways out of range and breathe through her mouth to keep control of herself.

“That’s not what happened,” Allison said, her voice thick with the tears already on his cheeks. “Stiles, that is _not_ what happened and you know it.”

“Yes, it is, Alli,” Stiles snapped at her. “That’s exactly what happened. I ended her life. That’s on me, it’s that simple.”

But Allison just shook her head, like they’d had this fight before too and she knew there was no convincing him otherwise.

Derek made a noise in his throat, soft and dismayed, and Leah would’ve taken his hand if she thought she could get that close without collapsing from the force of his emotions too. He looked nothing short of devastated, so betrayed, so lost and confused that Leah’s heart clenched in sympathy, and he smelled even worse.

His eyes, wide and wet, darted back and forth between Stiles and Allison, searching their faces at first and then looking to their chests. The pinch between his eyebrows got more and more pronounced by the second, his distress growing as he realized that he couldn’t heart their heartbeats, couldn’t gauge their truthfulness like he could before. With another noise that was almost a whine, he looked to Leah.

She gaped at him, helpless in the face of his helplessness and the faith he was putting in her. He was trusting her to be his ears, to tell him the _truth_ when he couldn’t trust his friends to do the same. And yet all Leah could do was shake her head, every bit as lost as he was; neither of them had lied.

Derek’s face crumpled. He gasped in another breath, ducking his head as he struggled to get a hold of himself. His fingers were curled against his palms, flexing like he felt the phantom press of claws that wouldn’t come anymore. When he lifted his head again, his face was blank and shuttered and his heart rate had slowed to something deliberate, carefully controlled in a way Leah had never managed.

In that moment, in his face and the cold sharpness of his eyes, Leah could see the old anger that had given him such strength in years past, the way fury could calm and anchor him. When he spoke again, his voice was steady.

“Explain,” he said. “Everything.”

All of the energy seemed to drain out of Stiles in an instant and he slumped back against the far wall. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes for a moment, just breathing into the expectant silence, and then dropped them again with a sniff. He didn’t raise his eyes from the floor.

“She lasted longer than most, you know,” Stiles said lowly. “Most of ours, I mean. Jackson and Peter had already taken off, and Cora was long gone. We lost Isaac; first one taken, but you were there for that. And my dad. We lost the twins, separately, which sucked. Then it was you, a-and Scott.”

His voice hitched on Scott’s name, but he didn’t stop.

“Then Malia,” he said. “Or, at least, we think she got snatched. Might be she just went native again, we’ll never know for sure. Kira was— It wasn’t the Warlock that time, but we still couldn’t save her. And then it was just us.”

Stiles sniffed again, reaching up to drag the back of his hand under his nose. The scent of salt was unmistakable even before he raised his head to show the tears on his face.

“There was just so much death. All around, everywhere you looked,” he said, shaking his head with a weak smile on his face that didn’t fit there at all. “And you know how Lydia was with death. It was kind of her thing, you know?”

Derek didn’t respond, as unmoving and unreadable as a statue, and Stiles’ attempt at a smile faltered and fell. He looked away and cleared his throat.

“The Nemeton explosion,” he went on. “It did something to the banshees, all of them. Blew their minds wide open to whatever the hell is out there. There’s a reason we steer clear of them when we can; they’re all a little off-balance, and Lydia was always the most talented of them all.”

Stiles looked at Derek directly now, held his heavy gaze without blinking.

“It was killing her,” he said baldly. “Even before we lost you, we knew how badly it was affecting her, and it only got worse. It got so much worse, Derek.”

Stiles’ eyes went unfocused, distant like he was seeing something play out that was no longer there, some unhappy memory.

“It was the screams,” he said, quiet enough that Derek and Allison probably had to strain to hear him. But Leah heard every word loud and clear, and they sent chills down her spine.

“Every dying shriek, every wail of the damned, she heard it. And she couldn’t make it stop, couldn’t turn it off or escape it. Even the strongest wards weren’t enough to shield her. All day and all night, everything she heard was death. She was drowning in it, little by little, that much deeper in the darkness every day.”

“Lydia was strong,” Derek said staunchly, but he crossed his arms over his chest like maybe they could block out what he was hearing, what he was about to hear. “She never let what she heard break her, not like the other banshees we met.”

“Yeah, she was always something else,” Stiles said with another smile, this one more genuine, fond even through his tears. “She was stronger than anyone I’ve ever known. But even the strongest of people have a breaking point, Der. And she may have been unusually powerful but that also made her exceptionally sensitive. She heard things the rest of them never could, not even if they tried, and sometimes…”

Stiles had to stop, his heart stuttering in his chest, until he could get the quaver in his voice under control.

“Sometimes we would lose her. To some kind of trance. Do you remember when she would do that? Just disappear for a while, mentally?”

Derek shifted on his feet, his jaw clenching, but he nodded.

“It got worse,” Stiles repeated, grim. “Sometimes she would disappear for hours, sometimes for days, so deep in that other place that we couldn’t reach her no matter what we did. And every time we got more and more scared that she wouldn’t come back the next time. _She_ was more scared than any of us. Of what she heard and saw there, of getting stuck, of not coming back from it.”

Stiles shrugged helplessly.

“She was losing her damn mind, Derek,” he said, “and you know her mind meant more to her than anything else. What could possibly be more terrifying to an intellectual like Lydia than insanity?”

Derek rubbed a hand over his mouth, looking a bit like he might be sick. Leah couldn’t blame him; she hadn’t even know this girl and she was fighting back tears of her own just imagining what she must have gone through.

Leah didn’t know a lot about banshees, but she knew the feeling of voices and sounds pounding in her ears, constant and inescapable, until she thought she might lose her mind from it. To have screams like the ones she had heard mostly from a distance, ringing out in the night, inside her head every minute of every day? It sounded like the worst kind of torture.

“So you, what?” Derek asked, his voice breaking. “You put her out of her misery?”

Stiles shook his head, but he didn’t actually deny it. Allison said his name, low and chiding, and he let his gaze find the floor again.

“The Warlock was taking over everything,” Stiles said, holding up a hand to forestall the complaint on Derek’s lips about changing the subject. “Beacon Hills was his hunting ground and he fed indiscriminately. I was doing what I could, what Deaton taught me before we lost him, what Lydia and I had figured out on our own. But it wasn’t enough.

“Someone had to do something,” Stiles insisted, “and I was the only one here, but there was no way. There was _no way_ for me to match his power without using his methods and sacrificing my soul in the process. No one was okay with that risk, Derek, but it was only a matter of time before the Warlock snatched up every man, woman, and child in the city, and then what? I had to do _something,_ and Lydia—”

Stiles pushed himself off the wall, wiping furiously at the tear tracks on his face. The tension in his shoulders was back, in every line of him from head to toe, pulled taut like a bowstring and ready to snap. He came to rest with his hands on the table, elbows locked and staring down at the map like he could still see the battlelines there, like he was watching the Warlock’s territory grow ever larger in real time instead of years in the past.

It was a long moment before he spoke again. Leah held her breath, counted the careful beats of Derek’s heart and the soft sighs of Allison’s breath beside her as she waited. She thought she knew where this was going and she ached with it, but something else in her understood. She understood.

“The warlock gets his power by stealing people’s sparks, taking their souls against their will,” Stiles said. “But the only thing more powerful than a stolen soul is one given freely.”

Derek made another of those sounds, like the air had been punched out of him, but Leah just closed her eyes and let out a breath slowly.

“It was her idea,” she said, looking at Stiles and him alone so she wouldn’t have to see Derek’s reaction.

Stiles nodded.

“It was our only chance, and we all knew it,” he said. “The only way I would be strong enough to take him on without destroying myself in the process.”

“And you were okay with this?” Derek asked, the heat of his grief breaking through the cold facade once more. “With using her as a sacrifice?”

“She didn’t give me much of a choice!” Stiles bit out, his grip white-knuckled on the edge of the table. “She made it very clear to me that she would be dead soon, one way or another. By my hand or by her own. At least if I did it, then her death wouldn’t be meaningless.”

Derek reared back with a low curse, turned away and ran shaking fingers through his hair.

“We were desperate,” Stiles went on with a new desperation of his own, begging for Derek to understand. “We all were, and Lydia more than anyone. She wanted peace, Der. She wanted an end to the suffering and the dying and the fucking voices in her head. An end to the fear. She would’ve done it herself if I hadn’t, and it would’ve been cruel to stop her, to force her to keep living in her own personal hell until she finally got lost so deep in the screams that she couldn’t find her way back. So I did it. I killed her and I used her spark to face the Warlock.”

Stiles let out a laugh, a sharp and bitter sound that scraped at Leah’s ears like claws on a chalkboard. His head hung low between his hunched shoulders, like he couldn’t find the will to lift it again.

“And it still wasn’t enough,” he said. “Humans are weak. Compared to supernaturals, their spark is next to nothing. That’s why the Warlock doesn’t bother with drawing from them. Banshees aren’t much stronger; they’re mostly just more psychically sensitive humans.

“Because it was a willing sacrifice, it was enough for me to match him in the moment, to force him out of the city and set up some roadblocks to keep him there for a while, but it wasn’t enough to take him down permanently. God, I murdered one of my best friends and it didn’t do us a damn bit of good.”

“Damn it, Stiles, it wasn’t like that!”

Allison pushed past Leah to brace herself against the table across from him, shaking with emotion.

“You didn’t _murder_ her. How many times do I have to say it before it gets through your thick, martyr skull?”

“I killed her!” Stiles shouted, the sudden slam of his fist against the table making Leah jump. “I ended her life, Alli, what else do you call it?”

“I call it mercy,” she told him. “You did what she asked of you. You honored her wishes and respected her decision. You set her free and you saved a lot of other lives in the process.”

“Did I?” Stiles demanded. “Because it looks to me like we’re right back where we started. The Warlock is gaining in strength, he’s closing in. More people are dying every day, I’m doing everything I can without crossing a line I can’t come back from, and I’m _still_ not powerful enough to stop him. Don’t you get it? Nothing I do is good enough! I couldn’t help Lydia, I couldn’t protect my pack, I can’t bring down the Warlock, I can’t fucking _do_ _anything_ to—”

“You could.”

Leah didn’t realize the words had come out of her own mouth until Stiles and Allison both turned to look at her at once. The weight of their gazes combined made her want to tuck tail and flee, but she couldn’t move with them pinning her to the spot.

“I—I mean, just...you _could,_ if…” she stammered, trying to think through the pounding of her own pulse loud in her ears, to put words to her nebulous thought.

She pressed her right thumb into her left palm, rubbing circles there like Derek did. Derek whose spark had been taken from him by force. Derek who was still alive, who had survived the draw and come out the other side human. Derek who was watching her now with just as much intensity as the others.

“You could defeat him,” she said, steadier this time. “If you had another sacrifice, a stronger one. Like me.”

Derek and Allison both shouted her name, but it was Stiles that Leah was concerned with. He stared at her for a long minute with his mouth hanging open—and this probably wasn’t the time for her to feel proud that she could shock the famed Emissary, but she had to wonder how many other people had managed that—and she waited, rubbing her palm and counting her own heartbeats to drown out the frantic voices around her.

“No,” Stiles said, the simple word cutting through the other’s protests with ease. “No, I can’t do that again. I can’t murder anyone else for my cause.”

“Stiles, what did I _just—_ ” Allison tried to say, but Leah spoke over her.

“It’s not just your cause. It’s all of ours,” she said, firm in that belief. “The Warlock made me what I am. He ruined my life, and I hate him for that. I want to help bring him down in whatever way I can. If this is what it takes, then so be it.”

Stiles shook his head again, harder.

“No, I can’t ask you to die for me,” he said, hoarse.

“You’re not asking,” Leah pointed out. “I’m offering. That’s the whole point. And besides, who’s to say it’ll kill me? We know now that it isn’t always fatal.”

 _"No,_ Leah, it’s too dangerous,” Stiles said again. “We can’t pin our hopes on the slim _chance_ that you might survive. I need all the help I can get in this fight, I can’t afford to throw away my allies like that _._ ”

“Then use me.”

It was Derek. His head was down, fists clenched tightly by his side, but his voice was steady. His heartbeat was another matter, thudding out of rhythm, but he didn’t back down when Stiles turned wide, disbelieving eyes on him.

“You can’t afford to lose fighters,” Derek repeated. “Well, god knows I can’t fight anymore, but I could do this. I can still do something to help. And I know I’m just...just _human_ now, so it may not be enough to stop him completely, but if it’s enough for you to deal him some damage and rescue Scott, then it’s worth it.”

Leah was hit with a wave of angry chemosignals so strong that she staggered backward with a whine, covering her nose on reflex. Stiles had gone red in the face and it felt like the air was sparking around him, crackling with magic that was every bit as furious as he was. He shoved the table out of his way with a screech of wood on concrete and advanced on Derek.

“No the fuck it’s _not!_ Are you fucking _kidding_ me, Der?” Stiles demanded. “In what universe would that _ever_ be worth it?”

Derek held his ground, jaw clenched, and said plainly, “The one where you’re running out of options. Looks like I’m your best one.”

“ _No!_ ” Stiles shouted. He took Derek by the arms, grip hard enough that it would probably leave bruises on his now-human skin, and shook him. “Goddamn it, Derek, I already lost you once!”

“And you survived four years without me,” Derek pointed out.

Stiles laughed, sharp and incredulous, but he didn’t loosen his hold. He held on tighter like the very mention of losing Derek was more than he could handle, like he needed to have his hands on Derek to verify that he was alive and well and would stay that way as long as he didn’t let go.

“Survived? If you can call it that,” he allowed. “But I won’t survive it again. I _can’t_ do that again, Derek, I would rather take the chance of using dark magic myself.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Derek snapped, putting a hand on Stiles’ chest and shoving him backwards. “It’s simple strategy, Stiles. You’re a valuable player and I’m not. The pawns are the ones that get sacrificed, not the queen.”

“It’s not a fucking chess game!” Stiles said, obviously wanting to reach for Derek again, to maintain that tenuous connection, but knowing better than to follow through when Derek was this angry. “And you’re not a pawn, Derek. You never have been, not to me.”

“Then what am I?” Derek asked sharply, holding his arms out wide. He waited expectantly, but Stiles didn’t come up with an answer quickly enough. Derek shook his head and went on, all his careful control from earlier in the argument gone. “What the hell am I now, and what am I supposed to do? Just sit back while Scott gets bled dry and the Warlock gets stronger? _Fuck_ that. You and your fucking martyr complex can sit here and do nothing all you want, but I won’t do it with you.”

Before anyone could say a word in response, Derek was out the warded door and slamming it behind him. There was a beat of silence, all of them stunned and scrambling to catch up to what just happened. And then Stiles put both hands under the table’s end and upended it with a hoarse shout.

Leah flinched at the abrupt noise and shrank even more into the furthest corner of the room, doing everything she could to blend into the peeling wallpaper and not draw Stiles’ attention onto her. Not that she wouldn’t deserve anything he wanted to dish out; this was all her fault. She should never have brought it up, at least not where Derek could hear, but she had and everyone was upset.

Stiles landed a kick to one of the table’s legs and it broke off, clattering to the floor. He snatched it up and threw it hard with a grunt of effort. It ricocheted off the back wall, leaving a sizable dent, and then rolled back to rest at his feet.

Stiles stood utterly still for a moment, fuming and surrounded by that uncomfortable crackle of energy again, and then muttered, “Fuck,” and made for the door. Leah skittered sideways, away from the door and from him, but Allison caught him by the arm before he could get there.

“Bad idea,” she said firmly.

Stiles snarled at her in a way that would make any werewolf proud and would send most humans running.

“You know how he gets, Stiles,” Allison said instead. “You are the _last_ person he wants to see right now. You go after him now and you’ll only make it worse.”

“Someone has to,” he said.

“Well, I doubt he’s eager to see me either,” Allison said, a hitch in her voice, “but you’re right. Leah.”

Leah halted her slow progression towards the door and cringed; she had really hoped they had forgotten her presence and she could make it out of this unscathed. She was exhausted and strangely empty feeling, like the storm of emotions around her had hollowed her out, and she wanted nothing more than to collapse in a real bed and pretend that none of this had ever happened. She should never have gotten involved with these people in the first place.

Apparently Allison didn’t agree.

“Leah, _you_ go after him.”

“W-what?” Leah stammered because she could not have heard that right, not after all the damage she had already done.

“Go after Derek,” Allison repeated. She kept a tight hold on Stiles’ arm like she didn’t trust him not to make a break for it, but her red-rimmed eyes stayed on Leah, open and pleading. “He’s more vulnerable than he’s ever been right now, and for all the talk of _Stiles’_ martyr complex, Derek’s got one just as big. I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do, but we can’t let him get past the wards. A human out alone at this time of night? He’ll be dead in an hour.”

Stiles made a pained noise and jerked free of Allison’s hold, but he didn’t run after Derek. Instead he just shoved his fingers through his hair and turned away, fighting for calm.

“But...why me?” Leah asked.

Allison smiled at her.

“Derek likes you,” she said. “He trusts you, like he doesn’t trust us right now. You’re his _friend_ and you might be able to talk him down. Or drag him back, if worse comes to worst.”

Leah crossed her arms over her chest, lip caught between her teeth. She didn’t have much faith in her own talking-down abilities; Derek had been really, genuinely upset, and what the hell was Leah supposed to say to make any of it okay? But Allison was looking at her so earnestly, like she really believed that Leah could do some good here. And the thought of Derek hurting, alone and in danger, made something in Leah’s gut curl up unpleasantly.

And it had been a very long time since anyone had called her their friend.

Finally, she said, “I’ll talk to him.” She made no promises about the dragging. She would never force Derek to do anything he didn’t want to, especially when he was already feeling so helpless.

Allison seemed to understand what she wasn’t saying. She bit her lip, but she smiled too.

“Thank you,” she said. “Just...keep him safe for us.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The front door was standing wide open and half a dozen people were clustered around it, alternating between staring out after Derek and glancing back toward the warded room he had come storming out of with very concerned faces on.

Leah ignored them and their questions, shouldering through the crowd to follow in Derek’s wake. He’d made good progress with his head start, but the wardline was a ten minute walk away from Headquarters and Leah made up the difference before it was even in sight.

“Derek!”

He didn’t slow down or give any indication that he had heard her at all, just kept striding down the empty street with his head bent and his every muscle held taut.

“Derek, just wait, will you?”

“Go back, Leah.”

“No,” Leah said as she jogged up alongside him.

He tried to walk faster, refusing to turn and look at her, but his newly-human body could only move so fast for so long. Even driven on by the grief and rage that surrounded him like a physical cloud, he was already flagging. It wasn’t hard for Leah to keep up.

“What do you even think you’re doing?” she asked, trying not to sound like a scolding school marm. “It’s dangerous out here at night, not to mention _cold._ ”

Derek shook his head, stubbornly ignoring the shiver that ran through him.

“I’m going after Scott,” he said. “He’s already been in that hellhole far too long, and if no one else is going to rescue him then I’ll do it my damn self.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Leah demanded, eyeing the horizon warily; the line of pebbles was just coming into view and Derek wasn’t slowing down. “Derek, _think_ about this. I know you want to get Scott out, but how do you plan to _do_ that by yourself? You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“The how doesn't matter,” Derek bit out, clenching in hands into fists and walking even faster. “I can’t just leave him there. I have to do _something._ ”

“Then come back to Headquarters,” Leah said, jogging forward until she could get in front of him, block his path and make him slow the fuck down. “Come back with me and we can talk to Stiles and Allison again, come up with a real plan, together—”

Derek growled so fiercely that the lack of fangs was negligible, but he did finally stop walking.

“ _Fuck_ Stiles,” he said. “He’s a liar and a coward.”

“He’s scared!” Leah argued. “He’s up against a giant with a slingshot here. He’s already lost so much and he’s terrified of what else he could lose if he fails. He’s still grieving over them too, Derek, can’t you at least understand that?”

Derek laughed, but it wasn’t anything like the low, warm chuckle Leah had gotten used to hearing from him. It was harsh, tinged with something like hysteria, and the smell of bitterness and pain was thick in the night air around them.

“Understand that?” he repeated incredulously. “I’m the fucking walking incarnation of it. If anyone understands losing pack, it’s me. I’m the only one left of my first pack, my family. My second pack is long gone, and god knows that one is my fault. And now I come back to find everyone else is gone too? Jesus, I can’t—”

He turned away, a hand over his mouth. There was the scent again, the one of old grief long buried that Leah had gotten off him in the woods that first night, and she thought maybe she understood now why they hadn’t scavenged wood from the ruined house there. After all, he had called it home.

“I can’t lose Scott,” Derek said finally, shaking his head. He took a step back, toward the wardline. “I’ve already lost everyone too many times. I can’t lose him too; he’s all I’ve got left.”

He turned away, newly determined, and Leah caught hold of his arm to keep him from going any further. He shot her a sharp look over his shoulder, the muscle of his bicep flexing under her hand as he balled his own into a fist, but she didn’t let go.

“He’s not all you have,” Leah said hotly. “You still have Stiles. And Allison.”

Derek immediately tried to jerk out of her hold. She stayed firm, not just because she had promised Allison she would keep him from leaving but because she _needed_ him to understand this.

“They are your pack too, Derek,” she reminded him. “They’re your friends and they love you.”

“They _lied_ to me,” he snarled. “They kept things from me. They lied about my packmates being dead, and now they’re just gonna leave Scott to die too. Well, if they won’t help him, then _fine,_ I’ll do it myself. I don’t need—”

Anger like nothing Leah had ever felt flooded through her. Not the feral rage of the shift, but a very human sort of indignation that made her throw her hands in the air.

“ _Who cares if they lied!_ ” she shouted.

Derek stumbled back a step, off-balance now that she had let go of him, wide-eyed and shocked by the outburst, but Leah didn’t care.

“Who fucking _cares?_ ” she shouted again. “It doesn’t matter, Derek! So they kept something from you for a few days, so fucking what? They are your pack. Don’t you _dare_ walk away from what you have left just to wander off and get yourself killed!”

Derek looked like he was going to argue. He even opened his mouth to speak, but Leah didn’t give him the chance to say anything else stupid. She thought she might hit him if he tried.

“I don’t care if they lied,” she said bluntly. “Putting aside the fact that they never straight up _lied,_ even with the omissions they thought they were protecting you. And yeah, they were wrong, but they were trying, Derek, because they care about you. They’re your _family._ You still have family, Derek! I would give _anything_ to have my family back and _fuck you_ if you abandon what you still have over something so goddamn easy to fix!”

Leah shoved a finger into Derek’s chest, claw snagging on his shirt.

“And you know what? This isn’t just about you and your bruised feelings,” she told him. “It’s you and me and Scott and everyone else in this godforsaken city the Warlock has ever hurt. So you are going to get the fuck over yourself, go back to Headquarters, and fucking _talk_ to Stiles, because he can’t do this without you. Got it?”

Derek looked away from her. There was a muscle working in his jaw as he clenched his teeth and his eyes strayed to the wardline again, but he didn’t move toward it. He just rocked back on his heels, breathing hard and clearly fighting with himself, and Leah dropped the accusatory finger.

“We need your help for this,” she said, softer this time, imploring. “And you need ours. We can find a way to get Scott out and take the Warlock down, I know we can, but only if we all work together.”

She could see in the slump of his shoulders that Derek knew she was right. The blind rage was leaching out of his scent now, leaving behind just a staticky residue, but the hurt was slower to fade.

It was clear that he didn’t want to go back just yet, so Leah didn’t push. She just took a minute to get herself under control; it had been a long time since she had last let her emotions have free rein like that and they left her feeling tired and unsteady.

“What happened to them?”

Derek’s question caught her off guard, soft words loud in the empty night.

“Them who?” she asked.

Derek wrapped his arms around his middle. It was cold out, sure—Leah would have offered him her jacket by now if she had been wearing one—but it looked like it was more for comfort than for warmth, a defense against the painful candidness of the moment.

“Your family,” he said, and Leah stiffened. “You said you’d give anything to have them back. What happened to them?”

Leah almost snapped at him that it was none of his business, almost told him to fuck off and what right did he have to ask. It wasn’t something she talked about. Not that there had ever been anyone for her to talk about it _with,_ but in six years she had never told another person and had never planned to.

But here was Derek, upset and vulnerable and looking somehow smaller than she had ever seen. Derek who had just admitted to her that he had lost his own family, and a slew of other packmates after that. Derek who was maybe looking for someone, _anyone,_ to be fully honest with him.

He had opened up to her, and she got the feeling that wasn’t something he did often or lightly. Didn’t she owe him the same in return?

“I don’t know, really,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen them in years. They could be dead for all I know, or they could be just fine somewhere without me.”

“What happened?” Derek asked again, looking at her with such overwhelming sympathy in his sharp eyes that Leah had to turn away from them.

“I wasn’t born a wolf,” she said, though Derek already knew that. “It was the first wave of the proliferation, all that loose magic from the Warlock. I just woke up one day with claws and fangs. I had shredded my bed completely.”

Her bedding, her mattress, the box spring underneath it. Even the headboard had been cracked in half, and she didn’t even remember breaking it.

“We didn’t know what was happening,” she said, words hoarse and raw even to her own ears. “All I knew was that I couldn’t make it stop. There were suddenly others like...like me, running through the streets, causing chaos and hurting people, and no one could stop them either. We hid indoors and just tried to keep me calm so I would stay human, but then…”

“The full moon,” Derek guessed.

“We should have seen it coming,” Leah said with a shake of her head.

The moon above them tonight was waxing, more than three quarters of the way to full, and she could already feel the pull of it like she had then, wild and inexorable. It was a gut-deep, primal thing, one that tugged at the wolf under her skin. She crossed her arms over her chest, wrapping helplessly claw-tipped fingers around her forearms and holding on tight enough to hurt.

She wondered how Derek felt now, staring up at a moon that had always called to him and feeling nothing at all.

“We should have expected it,” she went on, “but it caught us off guard. I went nuts. Screaming, howling, clawing at the walls. My parents were terrified, and they were right to be.”

Leah had to stop, fighting off the hitch in her chest that threatened to close off her throat. She could still hear the way her mother had shrieked, feel the shards of glass in her palms from the decorative figurines on their mantlepiece that she had destroyed in a rage, smell the stink of blood that was equal parts hers and not. She dug her thumb into her palm, shaking too hard to find the rhythm she needed. She strained her ears for Derek’s heartbeat instead, trying to count the beats, to steady herself with them.

“My brother,” she gasped out. “He thought he could reach me. Get through to me somehow, talk me down.”

“There’s no talking down a bitten wolf on their first full moon,” Derek said sadly.

“He survived the night, at least,” Leah offered, as if that were a comfort to either of them. “My mother got him away from me. My dad managed to lock me in the basement and block the door. The next morning, they threw me out. Said I wasn’t their daughter anymore—I was a monster. They had to look out for the child they had left.”

“Leah.”

“I don’t blame them,” she hastened to say, falsely bright and reassuring. “I would have left anyway, to keep them safe from me.”

She wondered what her heartbeat would have said about that, if Derek could hear it. She had been telling herself that for so long, she couldn’t remember if she believed it or not.

“Leah.”

“I haven’t been back there since,” she said, eyes straying south before she could stop them, off toward the place she had called home for the first sixteen years of her life. Her eyes burned—whether from welling tears or from the shift she wasn’t sure—and she couldn’t make out much for the blur of wetness barely held at bay, but that was better than having to look at Derek, having to see the look of horror and revulsion that she had always feared.

“I don’t know if they’re still there,” she said, “or if they crossed the border to safer territory. I tried to cross, but of course they wouldn’t let me through. So I just ran, and then kept running. I run and I spend the full moons alone as far away from anyone as I can get. As long as I do that, I can’t hurt anyone else like I did Justin.”

_“Leah.”_

Warm fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her hand away from where the claw on her thumb was digging into her palm and drawing blood. Derek wiped it away with the hem of his shirt, waiting for the skin to knit back together before wrapping her hand in both of his larger ones.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said softly.

There was no horror, no disgust or fear. There was only sorrow, an empathy that could only come from true understanding, and his heartbeat was perfectly steady. Leah squeezed her eyes shut, tears finally escaping to race hotly down her cheeks.  When she didn’t respond, Derek reached up to turn her face toward him, saying her name again until she could bring herself to look him in the eye.

“What you did on your first full moon is not your fault,” he repeated, more firmly. “I’ve seen a lot of betas on their first moon and honestly, the fact that you didn’t do more damage is a testament to how strong your love for your family is. It may not sound like much of a comfort, but you could’ve done much worse.”

“I clawed up my little brother.”

“You could’ve killed him, but you didn’t,” Derek stressed. “Your parents too. You let yourself be trapped in a basement that I guarantee you could have broken out of by humans you could have torn apart with a flick of your wrist. Even when you were out of control, you still didn’t want to hurt them, and that made a difference.”

Derek’s hand moved from her chin to cup the back of her neck, wide and solid, and Leah couldn’t help but lean into the reassuring touch.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said again. “And you don’t have to spend the nights alone anymore, Leah. We can help you. We can teach you the control you need to keep anything like that from happening again, even on the full moon.”

Leah looked up at Derek’s earnest face, at his blunt teeth and plain human eyes, glinting dully in the light of the damning moon that called so strongly to her blood. And she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that maybe they wouldn’t have to. If she could be the sacrifice, if she could convince Stiles to drain her spark, then maybe she could be human again and she would never have to worry about hurting anyone ever again.

But she knew what Derek would say if she voiced that thought, how worried he would be. She didn’t want to scare him, to make him face the possibility of losing another friend so soon after all the rest. She didn’t want to be responsible for putting that raw, distraught look back on his face.

She forced a smile on her face, thin and unconvincing.

“Let’s just take care of the Warlock first,” she said. “Or we won’t live long enough to try.”

Derek’s smile wavered a bit, but he nodded. He didn’t let go of her hand all the way back to Headquarters. Leah wasn’t sure which of them was taking more comfort in it, but neither of them was eager to let go.


End file.
